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Sumatra PDF Viewer is cool, thin, and open-source

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zridling:
Wow, see, this is what I'm talking about — all the great ideas listed here and no one to build them for us — go&$%%#@!!! In my next life, I'll be a programmer, but in this one, I don't have the brainwidth. Sumatra's advantage is its weakness — a simple "viewer." Ah well.

DARWIN: How good is Scansoft PDF Pro 4? I couldn't find a trial version to download. Slow-loading? That's what Acrobat is famous for, although version 8 isn't bad, I'm swearing off software that must be constantly "activated." Those apps make it a real hassle when rebuilding a system, even once a year or so. Like most, all I need it to read a PDF file 99% of the time. I write them most of the time using PDF Factory Pro, which is also great, but pricey.

Darwin:
Hi Zaine - I honestly forget how I wound up choosing Scansoft PDF Pro (well... I know how I wound up with version 4 - I upgraded to it!). I spent a lot of time reading reviews of Acrobat alternatives in the fall of 2005 and basically got confused... When I realised that Scansoft offered a 90 day money back guarantee I bought it because it was *sort of* leading the pack on feature set and user opinion (the other contenders were PDF Factory Pro and another, the name of which escapes me, now). I stayed with it. Version 4 is a quantum leap over 3 in stability and the "play nice with other software" factor, and it is very powerful. If you want to launch the editor it takes about a minute and change on my computer (probably a tad slower than PaintShop Pro XI). So not impressive at all, though YMMV given that my notebook should be taken out back and put out of its misery. Most of the time I just print to its virtual printer (has a nice range of options - very configureable) from Word and Powerpoint and it's very quick and produces small, searchable pdfs when used like this (but then, there are so many free pdf printer drivers out there...).

So, I guess in answer to your question "how good is PDF Pro 4" my answer is a qualified "very good", but if you're turned off by Adobe's load times, this is not the app for you (I think it's SLOWER, though I haven't had Adobe installed in a long time).

urlwolf:
So how about this...
We put together a donation of say $100 and give it to whoever (OSS programmer, donationcoder.com programmer, RentAcoder programmer) implements the feature set that we need -or close- in sumatraPDF. The result'd be OSS so everyone can benefit.

We seem to have a clear feature set in mind, and some (copying, highlighting) cannot be very difficult to implement, although I can be dead wrong!

What do you think?

PS: Honestly, I adobe cared about academics, who only want a -reader- with maybe highlighting and notes at a fraction of the price of Acrobat, we should not be worrying about this...

Nighted:
I tried Sumatra for about 30 seconds and deleted it. It failed to render the first PDF that I opened. I doubt I'll ever try it again. Anyway, I hate PDF and wish it would just die. Nothing there that couldn't be done in an archive using HTML (afaik).

f0dder:
I tried Sumatra for about 30 seconds and deleted it. It failed to render the first PDF that I opened. I doubt I'll ever try it again. Anyway, I hate PDF and wish it would just die. Nothing there that couldn't be done in an archive using HTML (afaik).
-Nighted (April 17, 2007, 12:15 PM)
--- End quote ---
Unfortunately, lot of people use it, so we're stuck with it.

PDF is good for one thing (and imho not much more than that): getting print output that looks correct (and even that doesn't always work, some linux-produced PDFs look absolutely horrible on windows, for instance). For computer use, .chm is the best format I've come across yet.

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