5 ms·

Wow, I just installed this for the first time and its performance blows both Adobe Reader (not an achievement) and Foxit (something of an achievement) out of th

Wow, I just installed this for the first time and its performance blows both Adobe Reader (not an achievement) and Foxit (something of an achievement) out of the water! Nice work by these devs. And its install footprint is around 10% of those programs. What the hell is Adobe doing, I wonder, that makes their software so unbearably slow and painful to use?

yoyohello13 3y ago
Even more impressive is I believe it’s a solo dev. SumatraPDF is one of my go to examples of a great software project. Something to aspire to.
tayo42 3y ago
> What the hell is Adobe doing Maybe they're handling every posts feature wish list? Like every comment so far here is Sumatra is nice but...< Some random feature > is missing
- seb1204 3y ago
  PDF-exchange - I have been using this for many years in a paid version. Fast and good editing features e.g. mark-ups. https://pdf-xchange.eu/pdf-xchange-editor/index.htm https://pdf-xchange.eu/pdf-xchange-editor/index.htm
dagw 3y ago
What the hell is Adobe doing Probably supporting 100% of the PDF spec. plus addressing all those obscure feature requests that 6 companies in this one very niche industry really really need. Sumatra is fantastic and basically the only PDF reader I use on Windows, but it does have maybe 10% of the features Adobe acrobat has. It is however the 10% that that basically everybody needs.
- Xerox9213 3y ago
  Acrobat Pro is pretty incredible. One of my favourite features is the following: on a scanned PDF after performing OCR you can edit the text and it will match the font. As in, it will create a new font based on the characters it found in OCR. I’m a high school math teacher and scan dozens of textbooks every year. Adjusting a few words before printing to match what we did in class is a huge time saver for me. Somehow my school division was able to buy me a one time fee perpetual license. I’m very happy with it.
- soco 3y ago
  For me even Sumatra or Foxit have too many features. I only ever open PDFs to read and print, maybe zoom, but all those other buttons there only distract me - if there'd only be a way to hide them... But yeah first world problems. I'm happy they exist.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    On Android mupdf mini gives me exactly that with a few implicit features that makes reading pdf books on mobile be 'ok'. There's a mupdf windows build. Perhaps that will do what you want. (Mupdf is also a library so there are a lot of different programs with the name in it by various programmers.)
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    Well there are always the stripped down/simplified gtk/gnome versions https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince
  - sundarurfriend 3y ago
    Have you tried Zathura: https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/index.html https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/index.html ? It looks like it's Linux only (I only have Linux so I hadn't checked before), but when I want to sit down and properly read something, the keyboard-centric UI and minimalism make it a really smooth and frictionless experience.
- kjksf 3y ago
  (I wrote SumatraPDF). I agree that Adobe has more features than SumatraPDF. Not necessarily the PDF spec itself - SumatraPDF displays pretty much any PDF you throw at it, just way more options and stuff. And it's not exactly slow. I'm sure the core rendering of PDF pages is same or faster. It's just slow to start. Like very, very, sluggish slow. And it's very visible to users. I don't think it's the features that cause the slow startup. They just don't seem to care about optimizing it. Chrome has more features that Adobe Reader. It has video calling, a capable PDF viewer and all the other stuff in ever growing web standards. And yet it starts up fast. Not instant as SumatraPDF but way, way faster than Adobe Reader. I think that it's more than fair benchmark regarding complexity of the app. The difference is that Chrome team cares about performance, including startup speed, and they spend a lot of resources on it. I remember Chrome was counting and removing C++ static initializers from their code (the code that runs before main()) because that contributes to startup speed. That's the level of care you need to have and I think Adobe just doesn't have it.
  - dharmab 3y ago
    > SumatraPDF displays pretty much any PDF you throw at it, just way more options and stuff Sumatra includes a 3D renderer to display embedded CAD models? https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/displaying-3d-models-pdfs.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/displaying-3d-models-p...
    - legends2k 3y ago
      I understood "pretty much" as "most" but not "all". I've been viewing PDFs for 20+ years and never encountered one with 3D content so ”pretty much” seems like a good adjective to use here for me.
      - dharmab 3y ago
        In engineering and manufacturing it's an essential feature used daily.
        3y ago
CodeCompost 3y ago
I got burned by Foxit when they started shipping spyware with it, so I'm hesitant now to try anything else.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Where can I learn about that?
  - CodeCompost 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxit_PDF_Reader#Issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxit_PDF_Reader#Issues
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Rolling around in money from all the licenses, I would imagine.
supertrope 3y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/ddh5p/comment/c0zfics/ https://old.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/ddh5p/comment/c0zfics...

yoyohello13 3y ago

Even more impressive is I believe it’s a solo dev. SumatraPDF is one of my go to examples of a great software project. Something to aspire to.

tayo42 3y ago

> What the hell is Adobe doing Maybe they're handling every posts feature wish list? Like every comment so far here is Sumatra is nice but...< Some random feature > is missing

seb1204 3y ago
PDF-exchange - I have been using this for many years in a paid version. Fast and good editing features e.g. mark-ups. https://pdf-xchange.eu/pdf-xchange-editor/index.htm https://pdf-xchange.eu/pdf-xchange-editor/index.htm

dagw 3y ago

What the hell is Adobe doing Probably supporting 100% of the PDF spec. plus addressing all those obscure feature requests that 6 companies in this one very niche industry really really need. Sumatra is fantastic and basically the only PDF reader I use on Windows, but it does have maybe 10% of the features Adobe acrobat has. It is however the 10% that that basically everybody needs.

Xerox9213 3y ago
Acrobat Pro is pretty incredible. One of my favourite features is the following: on a scanned PDF after performing OCR you can edit the text and it will match the font. As in, it will create a new font based on the characters it found in OCR. I’m a high school math teacher and scan dozens of textbooks every year. Adjusting a few words before printing to match what we did in class is a huge time saver for me. Somehow my school division was able to buy me a one time fee perpetual license. I’m very happy with it.
soco 3y ago
For me even Sumatra or Foxit have too many features. I only ever open PDFs to read and print, maybe zoom, but all those other buttons there only distract me - if there'd only be a way to hide them... But yeah first world problems. I'm happy they exist.
- dizhn 3y ago
  On Android mupdf mini gives me exactly that with a few implicit features that makes reading pdf books on mobile be 'ok'. There's a mupdf windows build. Perhaps that will do what you want. (Mupdf is also a library so there are a lot of different programs with the name in it by various programmers.)
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  Well there are always the stripped down/simplified gtk/gnome versions https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince
- sundarurfriend 3y ago
  Have you tried Zathura: https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/index.html https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/index.html ? It looks like it's Linux only (I only have Linux so I hadn't checked before), but when I want to sit down and properly read something, the keyboard-centric UI and minimalism make it a really smooth and frictionless experience.
kjksf 3y ago
(I wrote SumatraPDF). I agree that Adobe has more features than SumatraPDF. Not necessarily the PDF spec itself - SumatraPDF displays pretty much any PDF you throw at it, just way more options and stuff. And it's not exactly slow. I'm sure the core rendering of PDF pages is same or faster. It's just slow to start. Like very, very, sluggish slow. And it's very visible to users. I don't think it's the features that cause the slow startup. They just don't seem to care about optimizing it. Chrome has more features that Adobe Reader. It has video calling, a capable PDF viewer and all the other stuff in ever growing web standards. And yet it starts up fast. Not instant as SumatraPDF but way, way faster than Adobe Reader. I think that it's more than fair benchmark regarding complexity of the app. The difference is that Chrome team cares about performance, including startup speed, and they spend a lot of resources on it. I remember Chrome was counting and removing C++ static initializers from their code (the code that runs before main()) because that contributes to startup speed. That's the level of care you need to have and I think Adobe just doesn't have it.
- dharmab 3y ago
  > SumatraPDF displays pretty much any PDF you throw at it, just way more options and stuff Sumatra includes a 3D renderer to display embedded CAD models? https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/displaying-3d-models-pdfs.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/displaying-3d-models-p...
  - legends2k 3y ago
    I understood "pretty much" as "most" but not "all". I've been viewing PDFs for 20+ years and never encountered one with 3D content so ”pretty much” seems like a good adjective to use here for me.
    - dharmab 3y ago
      In engineering and manufacturing it's an essential feature used daily.
      - 3y ago

CodeCompost 3y ago

I got burned by Foxit when they started shipping spyware with it, so I'm hesitant now to try anything else.

wolverine876 3y ago
Where can I learn about that?
- CodeCompost 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxit_PDF_Reader#Issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxit_PDF_Reader#Issues

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

Rolling around in money from all the licenses, I would imagine.

supertrope 3y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/ddh5p/comment/c0zfics/ https://old.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/ddh5p/comment/c0zfics...