Sumatra PDF

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Sumatra PDF
Sumatra PDF logo.svg
SumatraPDF 2.png
Sumatra PDF
Original author(s) Krzysztof Kowalczyk[1]
Developer(s) Krzysztof Kowalczyk, Simon Bünzli and others[1]
Initial release 1 June 2006; 17 years ago (2006-06-01)
Stable release 3.1.1 / 2 November 2015; 8 years ago (2015-11-02)
Written in C++
Operating system Windows XP and later
Size 4.34 MB
Available in Multilingual
Type PDF reader
License GNU General Public License v3
Website www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

SumatraPDF, also known as Sumatra, is a free and open source document reader for Microsoft Windows. It supports numerous document file formats, such as PDF, CHM, DjVu, EPUB, FB2, MOBI, PRC, OXPS / XPS, CB7 / CBR / CBT / CBZ.[2]

Features

Sumatra has a minimalistic design, with its simplicity attained at the expense of extensive features. For rendering PDFs it uses the MuPDF library.[citation needed]

Sumatra was designed for portable use, as it consists of one single file with no external dependencies, making it usable from an external USB drive, requiring no installation.[3] This classifies it as a portable application to read PDF and eBooks in ePub and Mobi format.[2]

As is characteristic of many portable applications, Sumatra takes up little disk space.[2] In 2009, Sumatra 1.0 had a 1.21 MB setup file,[4] compared to Adobe Reader 9.5's 32 MB.[5] The installed size is 8.2 MB, whereas Adobe Reader XI requires 320 MB of available disk space.[6]

The PDF format's usage restrictions were implemented in Sumatra 0.6,[7] preventing users from printing or copying from documents that the document author restricts, a form of Digital Rights Management. Kowalczyk stated "I decided that [Sumatra] will honor PDF creator's wishes".[8][9][10] Other open source readers like Okular and Evince make this optional, and Debian patches software to remove these restrictions, in accordance with the open source principles of interoperability and reuse.[11]

Up to Sumatra 1.1, printing was achieved by transforming each PDF page into a bitmap image. This resulted in very large spool files and potentially slow printing.[12][13]

Since Sumatra 0.9.1, hyperlinks embedded in PDF documents have also been supported.[7]

Sumatra is multilingual, with 69 community-contributed translations.[14]

Sumatra supports SyncTeX, a bidirectional method for synchronizing TeX source and PDF output produced by pdfTeX or XeTeX.[citation needed]

Since version 0.9.4, Sumatra supports the JPEG 2000 format.[citation needed]

Development

SumatraPDF is written primarily by two contributors: Krzysztof Kowalczyk and Simon Bünzli.[1] The source code is developed in C++ programming language (some components it uses are written in the C programming language) and the source code is provided with support for Microsoft Visual Studio.[15]

As it was first designed when Windows XP was the current version of Windows, Sumatra initially had some incompatibility issues with earlier versions of Windows. Support for Windows 95, 98 and Me has since been dropped completely.[16]

Kowalczyk did not release a 64-bit version of Sumatra initially, indicating that while it might offer slightly more speed and more memory available, he believed at that time that it would greatly add to user confusion and that the benefits would not outweigh the potential costs.[17] However, some users requested 64-bit builds of Sumatra and other developers had compiled unofficial 64-bit builds[18] which loaded documents faster than the 32-bit builds. However, the official builds' developer had requested that unofficial builds did bear the 'Sumatra' name.[19] In October 2015, an official 64-bit version of Sumatra was released.[20]

The source code can be downloaded either via its Subversion development repository or as a tarball.[21][22]

The Sumatra source code is hosted on Google Code and because of US export legal restrictions is thus not available "in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria."[23][24]

History

The first version of Sumatra PDF, designated version 0.1, was based on Xpdf 0.2 and was released on 1 June 2006. It switched to Poppler from version 0.2. In version 0.4 it changed to MuPDF because of speed improvement[25] and better support for the Windows platform. Poppler remained as alternative engine for a while, and from version 0.6 to 0.8 it was automatically used to render pages that MuPDF failed to load. Poppler was removed in version 0.9, released on 10 August 2008.

In July 2009 Sumatra PDF changed its license from GPLv2 to GPLv3 to match the same license change on MuPDF.[26]

Version 1.0 was released on 17 November 2009 after more than three years of cumulative development, and version 2.0 was released on 2 April 2012, over two years after the release of version 1.0.[7]

The first unofficial translations were released in 2007 by Lars Wohlfahrt[27] before Sumatra PDF got official multi-language support.

In October 2015, version 3.1 introduced a 64-bit version, in addition to their original 32-bit version.[28][20]

Name and artwork

Early Logo of Sumatra PDF, inspired by the Watchmen comic.

The author has indicated that the choice of the name "Sumatra" is not a tribute to the Sumatra island or coffee, stating that there is no particular reasoning behind the name.[29]

The graphics design of Sumatra is a tribute to the cover of the Watchmen graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.[30]

Critical reception

Sumatra has attracted acclaim for its speed and simplicity,[31] for being portable,[32] its keyboard shortcuts and its open source development.[30]

At one time the Free Software Foundation Europe recommended Sumatra PDF, but removed its recommendation in February 2014, due to the presence of the non-freely licensed unrar code in Sumatra. Free Software Foundation Europe representative Heiki Ojasild explained, "while they continue to make use of the non-free library, SumatraPDF cannot be recognised as Free Software".[33][34][35][36] Unrar was eventually replaced with a free alternative in version 3.0, making it 100% free software.[37]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.[dead link]
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ update the license to GPLv3, to match mupdf's license change on github.com on 3 Jul 2009
  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ Sumatra PDF version history
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. ↑ This Amazing PDF Reader Is Portable And Tiny Submitted by Rob Schifreen on 21 July 2013
  33. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  34. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  35. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  36. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  37. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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