News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by kjksf on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @10:17AM (#35070007)
SumatraPDF author here. Glad people like the software for the reasons I thought the would (small, fast).

If you haven't already: use Ctrl + K (Command Palette), a better way to operate the program than menus etc.

Also I'll plug my latest project: I "ported" notepad2 to web:

https://onlinetool.io/notepad2/

It's 85% done i.e. some functions are not implemented.

On Chrome / Edge it can even read / write files from your computer (needs File System API). Otherwise files are stored in the browser in IndexedDB.

Not sure if it makes sense but here it is.

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by anta40 on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @10:32AM (#35070231)
I rarely use SumatraPDF because I often switch Mac-Windows. That said, I certainly appreciate small fast software, e.g uTorrent.

It's small because it's Windows only, and very likely avoid cross platform libs and rewrite everything on their own. For writing personal project, I agree cross platform my be over-rated. Just stick to your favorite platform. Make it works and optimized.

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by Macha on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @05:32PM (#35075698)
I guess you're talking the uTorrent of over a decade ago? Even on Windows I ditched it for deluge some time ago.
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by ismokedoinks on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @10:44AM (#35070386)
Hey just wanted to say I use your app for all my reading, both school and recreational. Having a good desktop ebook interface has probably 5-10x how much I usually read over the last year--thanks for that!
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by tavorep on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @10:54AM (#35070545)
I only wish I could highlight ebooks
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by chafporte on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @11:05AM (#35070687)
please add viewing of 2 pages side by side.
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by zczc on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @11:26AM (#35070997)
Menu(≡) / View / Facing
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by mkl on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @03:40PM (#35074440)
Ctrl-7 (Facing) or Ctrl-8 (Book view), depending on whether you want the first page to be by itself (book view). You should probably have a look through the menus to see what it can do before complaining.
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by anon9931 on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @11:29AM (#35071054)
I like to have SumatraPDF on every Windows machine I use, because it's so fast and light. And I like that I can easily change the theme via the Advanced Settings text file. It's great! Thanks for your work on it!
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by awry1 on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @11:56AM (#35071461)
automated crash reporting. Unfortunately it's a pain to build but this is single most important thing you can do to improve quality of your software... On the server, process those files and generate web pages for easy viewing of the crashes. I'm not a developer but I would think sharing what you can of your implementations of these would benefit others as well. i.e. good examples of exception handlers to catch crashes in the app, in crash handler download symbols from the server to get readable callstack, create a crash report that includes callstacks of all thread, program and os information and possibly any implementations of the processing of the files Possibly these are just blog posts intended for the junior developer or actual github repos. Thanks for all your work!
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by WhyNotHugo on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @12:24PM (#35071894)
I recall using SumatraPDF in its early days. I also worked at the IT department for a university and we started putting it in all PCs. It was fast, reliable and no licensing issues whatsoever.

I use zathura on Linux nowadays, and it like a not-too-distant cousin. It's perhaphs a bit less newbie-friendly, but it shares the same focus on "let's just render things fast and no BS", and also uses mupdf under the hood.

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by grishka on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @12:40PM (#35072130)
As someone who now also works on an open-source personal project, I'm really fascinated by this kind of thing.

As for SumatraPDF, I haven't used it myself because I don't use Windows as my main OS, but I definitely remember seeing that icon on other people's Windows machines. So it is reasonably popular in my part of the world. It also blows my mind that Windows still doesn't come with a proper built-in PDF viewer like macOS does.

Thank you for doing what you're doing! People like you make the world a better place.

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by grudg3 on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @01:00PM (#35072394)
> It also blows my mind that Windows still doesn't come with a proper built-in PDF viewer like macOS does.

Usually that viewer is the browser, so by default Edge is the default PDF viewer.

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by pcdevils on Thursday March 09, 2023 @04:11AM (#35079539)
Part of the push to use the browsers pdf engine was a result of Adobe acrobat being an endless festival of security bugs. Loading it in the browser allows them to reuse the same sandboxing. Pretty good idea for most folk. I like sumatrapdf because it keeps track of the pdfs I have open and the page. Like having an ebook reader on windows that doesn't suck.
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by hulitu on Thursday March 09, 2023 @08:32AM (#35080967)
> Part of the push to use the browsers pdf engine was a result of Adobe acrobat being an endless festival of security bugs.

The browsers are also "an endless festival of security bugs." Especially since they started to execute remote code. I can't view pdfs in browser. I need to zoom, find, and copy parts of (electronical schematics) pdfs and the browser version just sucks.

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by pcdevils on Friday March 10, 2023 @05:26PM (#35102093)
Agreed. I still use acrobat for form filling and this one for the rest
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by daveoc64 on Thursday March 09, 2023 @02:39PM (#35085604)
Adobe was reported to be threating Microsoft with anti-trust complaints in the mid-2000s, as Office had started to include support for outputting PDFs without needing to buy a plugin from Adobe.

I imagine they've steered clear of stepping on Adobe's toes since then.

The PDF functionality in Edge avoids these problems, as it's a standard web browser feature these days.

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by cvalka on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @12:41PM (#35072138)
Please fix your printing issue
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by mdaniel on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @01:06PM (#35072487)
I wanted to add my sincere thanks, too. I rarely use Windows except for gaming but SumatraPDF was always a must-have for me. I am also grateful you're a fan of the command palette, as I get a lot of mileage out of that in the JetBrains products, too
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by zerr on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @01:16PM (#35072640)
What do you do for a living? Do your open source projects help with getting new gigs?
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by kjksf on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @02:03PM (#35073305)
Retired thanks to TSLA.

> Do your open source projects help with getting new gigs?

I think it did a bit but not as much as I think it should.

You would think seeing a proof someone can deliver a complex app by themselves would be enough to skip the coding part of the interview, but then you would be wrong.

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by sharno on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @01:44PM (#35073058)
I love SumatraPDF, one of the best pieces of software that I use. It's stable, light, does what I expect it to do and didn't change interface or add a bloat of random functionality.

Thanks for all of you work.

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by deltree7 on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @03:17PM (#35074177)
SumatraPDF is one of the few reasons why I still use Windows. Glad to hear the relentless focus on speed.
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by mnsc on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @04:02PM (#35074666)
As an avid notepad2 user, thank you!
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by atlantic on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @04:14PM (#35074817)
I just want to stop by and say thanks. Many years ago, I was desperately looking for alternatives to AdobePDF, the unmentioned elephant in the room. I found your software, and never looked back. It was small, fast, and uncluttered. And it still is.
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by chasil on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @04:42PM (#35075142)
Some of our exotic engineering PDFs have attachments. When we converted to Edge, it was quickly discovered that these were no longer accessible.

I tried PDF.js, and it worked, but we ended up picking the very worst and most insecure PDF viewer that exists. Guess who that is?

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by nigrioid on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @04:58PM (#35075314)
I love SumatraPDF but I want the colored toolbar icons back.
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by fakedang on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @07:22PM (#35076686)
Any chance Sumatra PDF will support forms in PDFs any time soon?

Great software by the way, I was blown away by the speed of loading a pdf file. I never had such a fast PDF reader up until I started using Sumatra since last year.

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by akrakesh on Thursday March 09, 2023 @01:51AM (#35078860)
Thank you for SumatraPDF. I love that it's faster than any other PDF/ebook viewer I tried. I hate that EPUB content doesn't flow fluidly, which IMO defeats the purpose of the format, and that there is no way to customize its look in the advanced settings, because of which I couldn't use it to read ebooks.
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by johnnydoe9 on Thursday March 09, 2023 @01:58AM (#35078887)
Thank you for your work, really appreciate the app and have it on every device I run.
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by pcdevils on Thursday March 09, 2023 @04:09AM (#35079522)
Used Sumatra for so so long, always used ninite to batch install basic apps on new machines and one of the pdf apps they have as an option on the free ninite page is sumatrapdf. Great app. Thanks for all the effort
Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by lenkite on Friday March 10, 2023 @05:05AM (#35092563)
Many Thanks for your software. I used SumatraPDF heavily for 10+ years while I was on Windows. Used to shudder at Adobe Reader.