Sumatra PDF
Sumatra PDF Sumatra or short is a free, small and fast document viewer, which was originally developed only for displaying PDF files. Meanwhile, the program also supports the formats PS, XPS and OXPS, the e -book formats DjVu, mobi, Comic Book (. Cbr and. Cbz ), ePUB and Fiction Book (. Fb2 ), the format of the Windows help system CHM as well as the image File Formats TIFF ( multi-page), TGA, and JPEG XR. The open source software was written by Krzysztof Kowalczyk from San Francisco.
Properties
In the development of Sumatra PDF simplicity had the highest priority. The viewing of PDF files - - reduced, very small program with few features So one on the essentials was created. Since the program consists of only a single file and has no other external dependencies, it is ideal for portable use. Thanks to the sleek surface loads and the program works very fast.
You can display one or more pages at a time, and zoom in or zoom out to the text file. In addition, you can jump back and forth between pages, rotate views and search for text in the document. All documents can be sent directly from Sumatra out as an e -mail, saved or printed as plain text file. Text can be marked either with the mouse, or around by dragging a rectangle with the mouse while holding down the Ctrl key to the text. The present in the selection text can then be copied by a menu item or with a shortcut key to the clipboard.
Sumatra PDF has now been translated into more than 60 languages, including German.
By calling with certain options to quickly terminate the Escape key or a restricted mode ( disabling the File menu ) can be turned on, thus the program is ideally suited as a viewer eg for help files and print preview of applications. The appearance and behavior of SumatraPDF the user can change by editing a configuration file.
In one launched by the Free Software Foundation Europe initiative to accelerate the proliferation of alternative reading software for the Portable Document Format, PDF Sumatra was one of the recommendations.
TeX support
Since version 0.8.1 (May 2008) Sumatra PDF contains a LaTeX support by William Blum. The PDF viewer can be configured as a preview program, including backward and forward search in conjunction with a LaTeX editor so that LaTeX file and PDF file pdfsync using the LaTeX functions or SyncTeX be synchronized. The communication between LaTeX editor and Sumatra is done via the DDE protocol that is supported by many editors as TeXnicCenter and WinEdt.
In the backward search function to get there by double clicking on the corresponding passage in Sumatra directly to the corresponding source code line in the LaTeX file.
Jumping from the LaTeX source file to the appropriate place in the PDF file, fast forward search mode. When calling the forward search in the editor the corresponding point is automatically highlighted in Sumatra.
In the generation of LaTeX -based PDF documents with pdfTeX or XeTeX on Windows so the code Sumatra PDF is in most cases a good solution, it is easy to combine with the editors, TeXnicCenter, WinEdt, Emacs, Vim and TexMakerX.
History of development
For the first time the program was published on 1 June 2006 in the version 0.1. At that time it was based on Xpdf.
With Version 0.2 ( August 2006) the switch to Poppler as a renderer was. Due to better support the Windows platforms, the renderer of the document viewer MuPDF was also installed. Poppler has been permanently removed with version 0.9 (August 2008), now the program written in C is based solely on MuPDF.
The first unofficial translation into German was made in June 2007 by Lars Wohlfahrt, this laid the foundation for the in Version 0.7 (July 2007) introduced multilingualism.
Version 1.0 of Sumatra PDF was released on November 17, 2009.
A translation of PDF files to raster image before printing no longer takes place since version 1.2, which should speed up printing and save resources. The highlight text with the mouse was adjusted in version 1.3 the behavior of Adobe Reader.
Since version 1.4, a plug-in for the web browser Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome can be installed. Also can now represent AES -256 encrypted PDF documents. Support for XPS and Comic Book has been integrated into version 1.5. In the browser plug-in, a document can be printed or saved using the context menu.
With the 2011 released version 1.6 displaying DjVu and was (if Ghostscript is installed) also complemented by PostScript documents, and built a still experimental preview function for PDF documents in explorer for Windows Vista and 7, which so far only in the 32 -bit versions work fine. In addition, now displayed image formats and the program thus be used as an alternative image viewer.
Since version 2.0 (April 2012 ) of the Sumatra PDF reader is able to read e -book formats. For the layout has been carefully approximated to the appearance of a classic ebook reader.
With version 2.3 ( May 2013), support for processors without SSE2 instruction set has been temporarily suspended. The result was that the program was no longer capable of running on processors older than Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64. After massive protests users, this change was made only a day later with version 2.3.1 undo.
Name and appearance
According to the author the name of Sumatra is not intended as homage to the island of Sumatra or coffee, but there is no particular reason for choosing this name.