Sumatra PDF 1.2 |
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| Original author(s) | Krzysztof Kowalczyk |
| Developer(s) | Krzysztof Kowalczyk |
| Initial release | 1 June 2006 |
| Stable release | 1.9 / November 23, 2011 |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Type | PDF reader |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html |
Sumatra PDF, also known simply as Sumatra, is a free, open source, lightweight PDF, DjVu, XPS, CHM, CBZ and CBR reader for Microsoft Windows, written by Krzysztof Kowalczyk.[1]
The first version of Sumatra, designated version 0.1, was based on Xpdf 0.2 and was released on 1 June 2006. Version 1.0 was released on 17 November 2009 after more than three years of cumulative development.[2]
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Sumatra has a minimalistic design, with its simplicity attained at the expense of extensive features. For rendering PDF it uses the MuPDF library.
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.[3] This classifies it as a portable application.[1] As is characteristic of many portable applications, Sumatra takes up little disk space.[1] It has a 4.4 MB setup file, compared to Adobe Reader's 40.5 MB, for Windows 7.[4] Installed size is 8.4 MB, whereas Adobe Reader requires 335 MB of available disk space.[5]
Sumatra does not lock the PDF file. Without closing the PDF file, a user can recompile the text document and generate a new PDF file and then press the R key to refresh the PDF document.
Sumatra 0.5 and earlier versions can print PDFs that have disallowed printing. This feature has been removed from the newer versions. 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.[6][7]
Since Sumatra 0.9.1 hyperlinks embedded in PDF documents are also supported.[2]
Sumatra is multilingual, with 69 community-contributed translations.[8]
Sumatra supports SyncTeX, a bidirectional method for synchronizing TeX source and PDF output produced by pdfTeX or XeTeX. Since version 0.9.4, Sumatra supports the JPEG 2000 format.
As it was initially designed when Windows XP was the current version of Windows, Sumatra has some incompatibility issues with earlier versions of Windows. Support for Windows 95, 98 and Me has since been dropped completely.[9]
The source code can be downloaded either via its Subversion development repository or as a Tarball.[10][11]
The first version of Sumatra was designated 0.1 and was released on 1 June 2006.[2]
First Sumatra was based on Xpdf (v<0.2), then Poppler as backend but it changed to MuPDF because of better support for the Windows platform. (Poppler decided to focus on integration with Unix platforms.) After a phase with support for both (v≤0.4) Poppler was removed in version 0.9 that was released on 10 August 2008. The first unofficial translations were released in 2007 by Lars Wohlfahrt[12] before Sumatra PDF got official multi-language support.
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.[13]
The graphics design of Sumatra is a tribute to the cover of the Watchmen graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.[14]
Sumatra has attracted acclaim for its speed and simplicity,[15] its keyboard shortcuts and its open source development[14]. The Free Software Foundation Europe recommends Sumatra PDF.[16]
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