Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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