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

[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)

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.

[Darwin]

So... what is our status WRT cobbling together a biggish infusion of cash to spur Sumatra's development? Just wondering...

I actually navigated back to this thread to say that I'm using Adobe Reader 8 to open pdf's off my harddrve and Foxit as the default reader for on-line pdfs. I'm having difficulty picking one over the other! Foxit has such a tiny footprint, but AR is very well behaved - releases all the resources it was using when it's shutdown... I've used a tweak posted here by Ampa to bolster Foxit's rendering of fonts and it's considerably better. AR's strengths include better copy support and far more robust document navigtion (Foxit offers thumbnails only and only if they were set up by the author/creator of the document) while Foxit opens in the blink of an eye...

[Hirudin]

I'm going to give Sumatra a good run on my computer. I LOVE software I don't have to install. I don't format that much, but I'm still stuck in the Win98 mindset of "prepare for Windows to take a dump on you".

Not adding anything new here, but here's my thoughts...
Sumatra opens insanely quick... awesome!
It opened the 1 PDF I've tried so far.
I have copied text out of PDFs a couple times. I also search every now and then. These would be welcome and seemingly easy additions.

Yeah, I hate PDFs too. I hated them when they were 'this cool Mac thing, now for PCs too', I hated them when people decided to put them all over the web (um... isn't that what HTML is for?), and I hate the idea that Adobe dominates the PC PDF reader market.
Sorry to go on a rant here, but Adobe sucks! They're the worst when it comes to planned obsolescence, they're the worst for insanely high prices, all their programs are excruciatingly slow to open, they seem to make their programs with a one button mouse in mind *cough* Macs suck *cough*, and they're the worst for bloat. If I remember right, they were one of the first companies to include Yahoo Toolbar with their program (Acrobat Reader) too. If money started raining from the sky Photoshop C4 (due out next month the way things are going) would still be $700.

[SKA]

Sorry for OT remark , but would multipage TIF/TIFF  be a good replacement for pdf's ? I use black n white tif's for most of my correspondence & it works fine.    I use Universal Document Converter ( www.fcoder.com ) to convert docs into tif files

For color images Is there another image format apart from tif/tiff that is multipage ?

I'd really appreciate any advice on which application produces smallest size tif files (I am not having much success with IrfanView).

Thanks
SKA