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Sumatra PDF is a
free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...
document viewer that supports many document formats including:
Portable Document Format Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating syste ...
(PDF), Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM), DjVu,
EPUB EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes stylized as ''ePUB''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smart ...
, FictionBook (FB2), MOBI, PRC,
Open XML Paper Specification Open XML Paper Specification (also referred to as OpenXPS) is an open specification for a page description language and a fixed-document format. Microsoft developed it as the XML Paper Specification (XPS). In June 2009, Ecma International adop ...
(OpenXPS, OXPS, XPS), and Comic Book Archive file (CB7, CBR, CBT, CBZ). If Ghostscript is installed, it supports
PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...
files. It is developed exclusively for
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.


Features

Sumatra has a minimalist design, with its simplicity attained at the cost of extensive features. For rendering PDFs, it uses the MuPDF library. Sumatra was designed for portable use, as it consists of one file with no external dependencies, making it usable from an external USB drive, needing no installation. This classifies it as a portable application to read PDF, XPS, DjVu, CHM, eBooks (ePub, FictionBook, Mobi PDB and TCR), Comic Book (CBZ, CBR, CBT, and CB7) and image formats ( BMP,
GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...
,
JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...
, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, PNG, TGA, and WebP). Sumatra can also support
PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...
, PJL, and HEIF formats via external software. As is characteristic of many portable applications, Sumatra uses little disk space. In 2009, Sumatra 1.0 had a 1.21 MB setup file, compared to Adobe Reader 9.5's 32 MB. In January, 2017, the latest version of SumatraPDF, 3.1.2, had a single 6.1 Mb executable file; in comparison, Adobe Reader XI used 320 MB of disk space. The PDF format's use restrictions were implemented in Sumatra 0.6, preventing users from printing or copying from documents that the document author restricts, a form of
digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM ...
. Kowalczyk stated, "I decided that umatrawill honor PDF creator's wishes." Other open-source readers like Okular and Evince make this optional, and
Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...
patches software to remove these restrictions, in accord with its principles of interoperability and re-use. Through version 1.1, printing was achieved by rasterizing each PDF page to a bitmap. This resulted in very large spool files and slow printing. Since version 0.9.1, hyperlinks embedded in PDF documents have been supported. Sumatra is multilingual, with 69 community-contributed translations. Sumatra supports SyncTeX, a bidirectional method to synchronize
TeX Tex, TeX, TEX, may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Tex Earnhardt (1930–2020), U.S. businessman * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer ...
source and PDF output produced by pdfTeX or XeTeX.


Development

Sumatra PDF is written mainly by two contributors: Krzysztof Kowalczyk and Simon Bünzli. The
source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...
is developed in two programming languages, mostly in C, with some components in C++. The source code is provided with support for Microsoft Visual Studio. As it was first designed when
Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...
was the current version of Windows, Sumatra initially had some incompatibilities with earlier versions of Windows. Support for
Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...
, 98 and ME has since been removed. Initially, Kowalczyk did not release a 64-bit version of Sumatra, indicating that while it might offer slightly more speed and available memory, he believed at that time that it would greatly add to user confusion and that the benefits would not outweigh the potential costs. However, some users requested 64-bit builds of Sumatra and other developers had compiled unofficial 64-bit builds which loaded documents faster than the 32-bit builds. However, the official builds' developer had requested that unofficial builds not bear the 'Sumatra' name. In October 2015, an official 64-bit version of Sumatra was released. The Sumatra source code was originally hosted on Google Code. Due to US export legal restrictions, it was unavailable "in countries on the United States
Office of Foreign Assets Control The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the United States Department of the Treasury, United States Treasury Department. It administers and enforces economic and trade economic sanctions, ...
sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria''.''" The source code is currently hosted on
GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...
.


History

The first version of Sumatra PDF, designated version 0.1, was based on Xpdf 0.2 and was released on 1 June 2006. It switched to Poppler from version 0.2. In version 0.4, it changed to MuPDF for more speed and better support for the Windows platform. Poppler remained as alternative engine for a time, and from version 0.6 to 0.8 it was automatically used to render pages that MuPDF failed to load. Poppler was removed in version 0.9, released on 10 August 2008. In July 2009, Sumatra PDF changed its license from GNU GPLv2 to GNU GPLv3 to match the same license change on MuPDF. Since version 0.9.4, Sumatra supports the
JPEG 2000 JPEG 2000 (JP2) is an image compression standard and coding system. It was developed from 1997 to 2000 by a Joint Photographic Experts Group committee chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi (later the JPEG president), with the intention of superseding their ...
format. Version 1.0 was released on 17 November 2009, after more than three years of cumulative development. Version 2.0 was released on 2 April 2012, over two years after the release of version 1.0. In 2007, the first unofficial translations were released by Lars Wohlfahrt before Sumatra PDF got official multi-language support. In October 2015, version 3.1 introduced a 64-bit version, in addition to their original 32-bit version.


Name and artwork

The author has indicated that the choice of the name "Sumatra" is not a tribute to the Island of
Sumatra Sumatra () is one of the Sunda Islands of western Indonesia. It is the largest island that is fully within Indonesian territory, as well as the list of islands by area, sixth-largest island in the world at 482,286.55 km2 (182,812 mi. ...
or
coffee Coffee is a beverage brewed from roasted, ground coffee beans. Darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulating effect on humans, primarily due to its caffeine content, but decaffeinated coffee is also commercially a ...
, stating that there is no particular reasoning behind the name. The graphics design of Sumatra is a tribute to the cover of the ''
Watchmen ''Watchmen'' is a comic book Limited series (comics), limited series by the British creative team of writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins (comics), John Higgins. It was published monthly by DC Comics in 1986 and 19 ...
'' graphic novel by
Alan Moore Alan Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an English author known primarily for his work in comic books including ''Watchmen'', ''V for Vendetta'', ''The Ballad of Halo Jones'', Swamp Thing (comic book), ''Swamp Thing'', ''Batman: The Killing Joke' ...
and Dave Gibbons.


Critical reception

Sumatra has attracted acclaim for its speed and simplicity, for being portable, its
keyboard shortcut In computing, a keyboard shortcut (also hotkey/hot key or key binding) is a software-based assignment of an action to one or more keys on a computer keyboard. Most Operating system, operating systems and Application software, applications come ...
s, and its open-source development. At one time the Free Software Foundation Europe recommended Sumatra PDF, but then removed its recommendation in February 2014, due to the presence of the non-freely licensed unrar code in Sumatra. As foundation representative Heiki Ojasild explained, "while they continue to make use of the non-free library, SumatraPDF cannot be recognised as
Free Software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...
." Unrar was eventually replaced with a free alternative in version 3.0, making it 100% free software.


See also

* Foliate, a free and open-source e-book reading application for Linux * List of PDF software * List of portable software


References


External links

* * {{FOSS EPUB readers Free PDF readers Free image viewers Free software programmed in C++ Free software programmed in C Portable software Software using the GNU General Public License Windows-only free software