I have been using SumatraPDF on Windows for a long time. After opening a PDF file with it for the first time, I never went back to Adobe Reader. SumatraPDF is much faster, cleaner and less memory hungry.
It's very noticeably slower and computationally intensive compared to Sumatra (or Okular) with larger files like 1000-page long reference manuals as well as massive textbooks, both of which I frequently use. On web browsers, it generally takes a whole few seconds to load if you scroll quickly past a few pages.
I guess if you don't need to jump around in big pdfs, Firefox viewer is perfectly fine.
My comment is bound to be redundant in this thread, but so have I. SumatraPDF is an excellent piece of software that has made life for countless people easier and without them having to pay anything in exchange.
It's as simple as it gets (with a UI), it's fast, robust and reliable. I wish governments would set aside some generous budgets for this type of projects that are consistently useful and reliable, like they do for arts and education (well, some governments).
Other readers likely have this feature, but one I love is that you can re-generate the PDF out from under it and it reloads the new content. As someone writing in LaTeX on emacs and constantly re-generating the PDF, this is very helpful.
Yes! I often write LaTeX in vim under WSL with this setup and it works pleasantly. VimTeX re-compiles whenever I save the document, launches SumatraPDF on the first compilation, and SumatraPDF hot-reloads it without any extra effort on my part. I'm pleased to see a native Windows program and VimTeX under WSL interoperate so well.
tried it for some time, but quickly moved away since it had problems with rendering, comments and I need to highlight and annotate PDFs, also ocasionally I sign there documents with my transparent GIF signature, I don't think sumatra can do any of these
but I am adobe hater, didn't use their software for decades, now I am using for years Foxit reader
> comments and I need to highlight and annotate PDFs, also ocasionally I sign there documents with my transparent GIF signature, I don't think sumatra can do any of these
When I open PDFs I often want to edit the filename to adjust it to the content. SumatraPDF is awesome and opposed to Adobe Reader and other PDF readers it does not take an exclusive lock on the PDF file so you can edit its filename.
The fact that it is extremely fast is another big benefit.
I sometimes work with Paged Media CSS, I’ll often need to generate a file multiple times after editing the CSS to see if it accomplished what I wanted. With Sumatra PDF it instantly updates the file when the new version is generated, it’s awesome.
Sumatra, alongside maybe Everything and IrfanView, is my favorite piece of software on windows. Incredible speed, great customizability and awesome compatibility.
I really missed it when I made the switch to Linux, but not enough to consider installing WINE. Still, absolutely wonderful project deserving of the highest praise.
Paint.NET is great, too. It's not open source, unfortunately (for valid if regrettable reasons), but it's free as in free beer. The memory of its GUI makes me sigh a little whenever I open GIMP.
Apparently the author was unhappy with someone re-releasing the software while erasing the original credits (multiple times?): <https://stackoverflow.com/a/1693549>. Not sure why hiding the source code would help much, but oh well.
Paint.NET was open source, but a pirate would download the code, put their name over the author’s, and click build. That’s a very clear case of copyright violation, but the author decided it wasn’t worth the effort (especially if the pirate is in another country).
> Initially, Paint.net was released under a modified version of the MIT License, with the exclusion of the installer, text, and graphics. It was completely open-source, but because breaches of license, all resource files (such as interface text and icons) were released under a non-free Creative Commons license forbidding modification, and the installer was made closed-source. Version 3.36 was initially released as partial open-source, but Brewster later took down the source code, citing problems with plagiarism. In version 3.5, paint.net became proprietary software. Users are now prohibited from modifying it.[1]
TL;DR They used a MIT licence and other people were selling broken, rebranded cashgrab copies without changing things like the installer or crash logs being sent to the author etc
It's more than frustrating to have crash logs that don't refer to your code and contain access tokens or similar data because the author of the 'rebranded' software doesn't care about user privacy.
I use photopea.com. It's a Photoshop clone but loads much faster and works great for when you don't need some of the newest / cutting edge PS features and don't work with large files.
Nothing wrong with it, I just think it's too much stuff to have on my system for a single program. And it introduces new kinds of vulnerabilities that I don't care for.
Not the poster but in brief using wine for your workflow implies that between version n and n+1 something may stop working potentially with a workaround or potentially forever. It's also styled funny compared to native apps.
I love Sumatra too. I dislike there is no dark mode so I just used inverted colors and it has worked well. Super lightweight and simple. Unlike adobe which is bloated, slow, and annoying.
Big kudos to the author for not getting sucked into the Electron Maelstrom. I find it so interesting that fancy MVU style Elm web UI event loops etc. all just reinvent the message loop that Windows has used since Win95.
My PDF journey went from Adobe to Foxit to Firefox to SumatraPDF to Okular.
I chose Okular over SumatraPDF because it does form fills and saves said form fill data to a new PDF. (Sumatra may do form fills now, IDK)
I never would have tried Ocular if I wasn't on Fedora KDE, Sumatra was good enough, and I just fell back to FF when I had to do form fills (then print via CutePDF).
Now that Okular is just a 'choco install okular' away from having it on Windows as well as Linux, I get application consistency, form-fills that save modified PDF files, and annotation stuff.
Agreed. And it's written in the native Win32 API. I personally find native Win32 apps much more usable with better UI/UX than most "modern" frameworks.
There really is an abundance of high quality, and performant open-source applications on Windows. Among the three you've listed, I can also mention Notepad++, JPEGView, MPC-HC, Scoop.sh, and ShareX.
FSearch is intended to be an alternative to Everything. However it doesn't have feature parity (and probably won't ever have due to some platform limitations on Linux). Disclaimer: I'm the author of FSearch.
I also like to use fzf a lot, which is an amazing search utility (not only for finding files) for the terminal.
I still install Sumatra PDF on every Windows PC I have to work on. It's a habit I've kept from the days when Acrobat Reader took like 30 seconds to start.
Does anyone know why it's never possible to just transfer money, but they ask for patreon or paypal? I live in the EU and as far as I know its super cheap to send money into a bank account. At least cheaper than what I suppose is patreon's cut.
Because in the U.S. we don't really have a standardized way to transfer money to another bank account, at least not without knowing their bank routing number and account number, which isn't really information you want to share :)
Sorry this may be an obvious thing but I am genuinely curious (and I don't live in the US): why would one be afraid of sharing those?
It's not like they're your credit card details or something. What am I missing?
Because the same two numbers (routing and account) are used to deposit money AND debit money.
So if you post your account numbers I can pull all your money out. Now you'll likely get it back if you file a fraud claim, but that's an extra Hassel, and your out finds until they give you a provisional credit.
Here in the UK while it's super easy to set up a fraudulent direct debit on someone else's account details, it's equally easy to claim those payments back (and the scheme guarantees you the right to be able to claim a payment back for any reason, doesn't even have to be fraud - the merchant can of course still chase you if you've declined a legitimate payment you owe them).
It's also why Donald Knuth doesn't hand out real cheques anymore… too many people (me included, but I later blackened those parts) posted pictures of their cheques online: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html
well its the same in europe but its not that this is happening. the information (IBAN) you need to wire money via SEPA transfer can also be used to fake an automated SEPA debit system for subscriptions.
E V E R Y german company has their SEPA information on almost every piece of writing that leaves the company (in the footer) and thus far i think widespread misuse/fraud is not really a thing.
The debit system for sub here in HK is only possible on the user side. You can't automate it like in Europe, the dude has to go to his own account and register it himself with the company's target account.
But what you say must be impossible in SEPA too - to fake a sub registration you'd have to register with a corporation ID as a subscription receiver in the SEPA area. I'd suppose at least you fraud one person you're immediately found. But it's also that you probably can't even register without at least a sort of reputation check.
Yes — and it doesn't require anything more than a typo. Whether or not the banks will reimburse it will depend on the bank and whether the money has already moved from the target account. It's never fast but I've heard at least a few stories about complete nightmares where the bank was essentially accusing the victim of fraud despite having utterly failed to protect their customer.
Thank you for responding.
It is really horrible it sounds like you can not really be safe. Really strange that the owner is not authorising the payout from his/hers account.
That can't be right. Im a European living in Hong Kong, both places, widely different you'll admit (HK still doesn't have frigging IBANs), I can give you here my account number, you'd be able to do NOTHING with it, nothing but GIVE me money.
To withdraw in both continent you'd need a pin or a signature + a tamper-proof ID card. The web app in Hong Kong has 2 passwords + 2 private key phone checks + insta SMS sent on any output. My French bank resets the private key every 3 months and require a strong re-auth (SMS or postal mail).
To direct debit, in HK you can only trigger it from the source account by registering the target online, it can't be done the other way around, while in France you need a signed authorization - but I suppose that can be faked if you have a target entity already registered and fake signatures to a bank.
And you're telling me in the US I know your target bank account to wire you pocket money at your birthday, I can also just withdraw ? That can't be right sorry.
>And you're telling me in the US I know your target bank account to wire you pocket money at your birthday, I can also just withdraw ? That can't be right sorry.
I moved to Canada recently and here we have something called Interac e-transfer — you can send anyone money using only their phone number or email address. I’m not sure why the U.S. is so behind in that regard.
Despite getting free transfers (UK), I prefer middlemen.
I've had one transfer via Revolut, it was significantly more effort than I'd expected, but I'd do it again if explicitly asked for.
General security advice is to not share your bank details. I'd rather take the hit from PayPal fees or someone not donating rather than worrying about fraud. [0] for example.
Patreon (etc..) is recurring revenue, which builds confidence that what you're doing is sustainable long-term. When an OSS project opens for donations, it typically has an established userbase. The first "ask" will bring a comparatively large amount of money compared to the next "ask", and it raises the question of whether one-time donations will dwindle to zero. Recurring revenue hedges against that (and also allows more community building).
People in the US use either Paypal or Zelle for personal transfers. Zelle is a standard that's supported by most US banks. Otherwise, Paypal. But Patreon even though they take a cut is used more because it's easy to give people exclusive benefits.
For me, it puts a comfortable professional distance between public projects and real accounts, and it reduces friction on pseudonymous and international payments.
Banks and credit unions in the US usually have a bill pay system to send checks or e-checks for free. Some people do use it to contribute to projects, sometimes even as a recurring donation, but it's rare. I'm not sure it would be so cheap if it weren't rare.
Not that it justifies 2.4 GB but the products are very different. One is read only while the other is everything you could ever imagine wanting to do with a PDF. e.g. Infranview is expected to be significantly smaller than GIMP too.
For the most part that's perfect though. 99% of the time I just want to read a PDF so I just use the PDF reading tool not the PDF everything tool. That being said signing/form filling does bring me back to other solutions occasionally.
In fairness, acrobat is a full fledged editor of a hacked file format. My Acrobat Reader DC install is sitting st 384 MB and Sumatra is at 18.7 MB; only a factor of 20 larger. :)
This app has gotten me through so many days of undergrad. It's one of the only windows apps that can handle textbook-sized pdfs well. I can search on text quickly too, while Adobe Reader can barely open any PDF larger than 100 pages.
It's amazing to see the drive of "I know what I want to make and I do it the way I want" carry the project for so long. More than any development ideology just having the passion to continue working on whatever it is you're doing is an extremely powerful force for creating useful software. And SumatraPDF is definitely useful software, has been for a long time.
"ideology doesn't matter as much as doing" being said the syntax valid semantic invalid error at the end of this excerpt in the section on extensive tests being overrated gave me a chuckle:
> Dogma is powerful. Sometimes in my corporate life I felt like writing tests was just going through motion. Maybe we should spend more time writing code instead, I though?
In all seriousness I agree though. In a project where you write the majority of the code it is possible to overdo tests in a way that you are wasting more time than you're saving yourself and in a passion project efficiency isn't always as important as interest anyways.
One of the pains of moving from windows to a Mac was not having Sumatra. I've been using it on Windows for so long. I have tried many options on Mac, but they just doesn't feel "right" (too many options in viewers like Acrobat, too less features compared to Sumatra in others). Any plans to create a mac version?
Sumatra is pretty nice, and definitely an app I miss on Linux. I used to use evince, but it had more compatibility issues (it uses the Poppler library that Sumatra dropped) and I wasn't a fan of the UI redesigns for Gnome 3.
These days I actually use Firefox as my Linux PDF reader.
I just downloaded it and I'm quite impressed with the ease of use of the color options. Just a few lines in a text file. I can swap between dark and light modes easily.
Does anyone know if the window background can be darkened at all? The window UI text color is controlled by the same setting as the pdf text color, so when using a dark background/light text mode the window UI text is very low contrast.
> I just downloaded it and I'm quite impressed with the ease of use of the color options. Just a few lines in a text file. I can swap between dark and light modes easily.
Not just that, but you can change the settings file while the reader is open and it will update immediately. I use a one-line cmd script to switch quickly between light and dark.
I think "spirit of SumatraPDF" means that he wouldn't npm install 800K lines of code into his project 5 minutes after creating it.
I look at the speed and efficiency of VSCode and it gives me hope that it's possible to write the high quality programs that we're used to from C/C++ using web technologies. It's just that right now we don't have enough good programmers creating good programs to incentivize the others to do better.
I don't know that VSCode is a great example. I just started it and SublimeText and VSCode takes an order of magnitude more memory. If I watch the Task Manager as I type into each, VSCode also uses about 10x as much CPU which translates into worse battery consumption.
VS Code is neither fast nor efficient. I'm not hating on it as I like it more than most Electron apps, but I use it on a laptop with a Core 2 Duo P8600 CPU (among other things) and it's pretty sluggish.
I used Sumatra on a very old Windows laptop a decade ago, and became a fan because it was so lightweight that it rendered documents quickly, even on outdated hardware.
long time user of SumatraPDF, this was a good read.
> Let's say I need to do a network request. I could include a monster library like curl or I could write 300 lines of code using win32 APIs. I wrote 300 lines of code.
huh, reminds me of tangent I have been in the same exact boat and did the same. Then something came up with SSL and just dragged in curl and doubled executable size. I think things are better these days in WinHTTP..
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadIt's one the first programs I install on every new system and have recommended it to friends for years.
If any of the programmers involved read here: Thank you very much for all the hard work. It was worth it.
I guess if you don't need to jump around in big pdfs, Firefox viewer is perfectly fine.
It's as simple as it gets (with a UI), it's fast, robust and reliable. I wish governments would set aside some generous budgets for this type of projects that are consistently useful and reliable, like they do for arts and education (well, some governments).
but I am adobe hater, didn't use their software for decades, now I am using for years Foxit reader
Indeed, it's a "viewer" not an "editor" :)
Congrats on the good work!
Come on, voices! Shout! "Worse is better" is the root of all evil. It's a virus, like C and Unix, and it is why most software is so miserable.
Feature bloat is another reason software is miserable.
I really missed it when I made the switch to Linux, but not enough to consider installing WINE. Still, absolutely wonderful project deserving of the highest praise.
Images of a few megapixels will cause it to crash or hang on selection. Happened so many times that I am forced to use GIMP.
Well now you got me curious. Why is that?
https://blog.getpaint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.net#History
TL;DR They used a MIT licence and other people were selling broken, rebranded cashgrab copies without changing things like the installer or crash logs being sent to the author etc
[1] https://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paint...
It's more than frustrating to have crash logs that don't refer to your code and contain access tokens or similar data because the author of the 'rebranded' software doesn't care about user privacy.
https://www.photopea.com/api/accounts
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_...
Bought a license years ago but still use it daily.
https://bvckup2.com/wip/
https://sioyek.info/
(Disclaimer: I am the developer of sioyek)
It has no particular relation to PDFs :D. It's just a random name. I also like the number 31.
My PDF journey went from Adobe to Foxit to Firefox to SumatraPDF to Okular.
I chose Okular over SumatraPDF because it does form fills and saves said form fill data to a new PDF. (Sumatra may do form fills now, IDK)
I never would have tried Ocular if I wasn't on Fedora KDE, Sumatra was good enough, and I just fell back to FF when I had to do form fills (then print via CutePDF).
Now that Okular is just a 'choco install okular' away from having it on Windows as well as Linux, I get application consistency, form-fills that save modified PDF files, and annotation stuff.
But for Grandma? SumatraPDF it is.
I'm pretty sure Windows had a message loop since the very first version.
I also like to use fzf a lot, which is an amazing search utility (not only for finding files) for the terminal.
As for pdfs and stuff, zathura, Okular, Calibre, or whatever ships with the distro are usually fine.
Silly, I know.
So if you post your account numbers I can pull all your money out. Now you'll likely get it back if you file a fraud claim, but that's an extra Hassel, and your out finds until they give you a provisional credit.
Here in the UK while it's super easy to set up a fraudulent direct debit on someone else's account details, it's equally easy to claim those payments back (and the scheme guarantees you the right to be able to claim a payment back for any reason, doesn't even have to be fraud - the merchant can of course still chase you if you've declined a legitimate payment you owe them).
I don't know if something really happened or if he was just being cautious, but so the Bank of San Seriffe was born: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html
E V E R Y german company has their SEPA information on almost every piece of writing that leaves the company (in the footer) and thus far i think widespread misuse/fraud is not really a thing.
But what you say must be impossible in SEPA too - to fake a sub registration you'd have to register with a corporation ID as a subscription receiver in the SEPA area. I'd suppose at least you fraud one person you're immediately found. But it's also that you probably can't even register without at least a sort of reputation check.
To withdraw in both continent you'd need a pin or a signature + a tamper-proof ID card. The web app in Hong Kong has 2 passwords + 2 private key phone checks + insta SMS sent on any output. My French bank resets the private key every 3 months and require a strong re-auth (SMS or postal mail).
To direct debit, in HK you can only trigger it from the source account by registering the target online, it can't be done the other way around, while in France you need a signed authorization - but I suppose that can be faked if you have a target entity already registered and fake signatures to a bank.
And you're telling me in the US I know your target bank account to wire you pocket money at your birthday, I can also just withdraw ? That can't be right sorry.
Yes, it can be and it is right.
Despite getting free transfers (UK), I prefer middlemen.
I've had one transfer via Revolut, it was significantly more effort than I'd expected, but I'd do it again if explicitly asked for.
General security advice is to not share your bank details. I'd rather take the hit from PayPal fees or someone not donating rather than worrying about fraud. [0] for example.
Patreon (etc..) is recurring revenue, which builds confidence that what you're doing is sustainable long-term. When an OSS project opens for donations, it typically has an established userbase. The first "ask" will bring a comparatively large amount of money compared to the next "ask", and it raises the question of whether one-time donations will dwindle to zero. Recurring revenue hedges against that (and also allows more community building).
[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7174760.stm
Banks and credit unions in the US usually have a bill pay system to send checks or e-checks for free. Some people do use it to contribute to projects, sometimes even as a recurring donation, but it's rare. I'm not sure it would be so cheap if it weren't rare.
For the most part that's perfect though. 99% of the time I just want to read a PDF so I just use the PDF reading tool not the PDF everything tool. That being said signing/form filling does bring me back to other solutions occasionally.
"ideology doesn't matter as much as doing" being said the syntax valid semantic invalid error at the end of this excerpt in the section on extensive tests being overrated gave me a chuckle:
> Dogma is powerful. Sometimes in my corporate life I felt like writing tests was just going through motion. Maybe we should spend more time writing code instead, I though?
In all seriousness I agree though. In a project where you write the majority of the code it is possible to overdo tests in a way that you are wasting more time than you're saving yourself and in a passion project efficiency isn't always as important as interest anyways.
These days I actually use Firefox as my Linux PDF reader.
Does anyone know if the window background can be darkened at all? The window UI text color is controlled by the same setting as the pdf text color, so when using a dark background/light text mode the window UI text is very low contrast.
Thanks :)
Not just that, but you can change the settings file while the reader is open and it will update immediately. I use a one-line cmd script to switch quickly between light and dark.
I like people that know to say NO and produce obviously good thing on their own.
- is fast AF
- supports SyncTeX
- doesn't unnecessarily lock the files it has open
That feels like a 180 after reading a couple thousand words extolling the virtues of small, fast code with minimal dependencies.
I look at the speed and efficiency of VSCode and it gives me hope that it's possible to write the high quality programs that we're used to from C/C++ using web technologies. It's just that right now we don't have enough good programmers creating good programs to incentivize the others to do better.
> Let's say I need to do a network request. I could include a monster library like curl or I could write 300 lines of code using win32 APIs. I wrote 300 lines of code.
huh, reminds me of tangent I have been in the same exact boat and did the same. Then something came up with SSL and just dragged in curl and doubled executable size. I think things are better these days in WinHTTP..