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

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maxdanger:
Like mwb1100, I also recommend Adobe Reader SpeedUp.  I had problems with Foxit and several other readers, converters, etc.  My use is very much like Darwin's, primarily academic journals and, very rarely, form-filling (rebate forms--gack!).  But re-tuned by AR-SpeedUp, Acrobat is fast, fully competent, and I never have to check Task Manager or Process Explorer to find what's the hold-up.  I haven't encountered the mystery zoom problem--yet.

urlwolf:
Does this speedup thing work with full Acrobat?

f0dder:
Hm, no copy function will make it a no-go :(

But I'll check it out anyway. Foxit is very nice, but is dog slow when rendering more complex PDFs. Additionaly memory usage of Sumatra doesn't bother me much, unless it's a linear (or worse :)) function of the size of the pdf.

The AR speedup thing is nice, but last time I tried it, it was still noticably slower than foxit...

urlwolf:
Hmm, I wonder if a joint donation of say $100 between all members here would make things like copy funciton, highlighting, etc, happen.

Anyone wants to post in their forum/mail the author?

f0dder:
Okay, just gave Sumatra a quick test drive.

#1 - rendering. Unfortunately I don't have any of those "really heavy" PDFs lying around, but it seems to do quite well. Also, while foxit seems to "render as you go" (causing flickering), Sumatra seems to render a full page offscreen before drawing - smooth. On the other hand, it's noticeably slower at displaying the S.T.A.L.K.E.R user manual... slow jpeg decompression, perhaps?

#2 - memory usage. 32meg pdf, Tanenbaum's Distributed Operating Systems. Foxit Reader uses ~4meg private bytes, Sumatra uses ~10meg private bytes. Nothing to worry about, imho. Also, if opening multiple PDFs, you get multiple instances of Foxit, but only one instance of Sumatra.

#3 - stability. I managed to crash Sumatra by having a bunch of PDFs open and paging back and forth in one of Intel's systems manuals... don't think I've seen Foxit crash yet.

Sumatra seems promising though, and it's nice that it's opensource. Might even be worth to dig in myself and run a little profiling on it...

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