Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Sumatra PDF Viewer

This will be a very quick blog post, perhaps more appropriately classified as a "shout-out". The PDF format is wonderful for preserving detailed formatting across multiple platforms, and is all over the web. Thus, we need an application to view these files.

Most people are familiar with Adobe Acrobat Viewer, as Adobe was the original creator of the PDF format, and hence had the first authoring and viewing tools for the PDF format. Unfortunately, their viewer application continues to increase is size and decrease in speed with each successive release. The later versions of the application go so far as to auto-run portions of the application at startup, to reduce perceived start up times later on when you actually want to view a PDF file (much like that bloated pig of an office suite - MS Office).

If you are looking for a lighter weight solution to viewing PDF files on the Windows platform, let me recommend the Sumatra PDF Viewer. It is light weight, clean, and functional. It does not contain all of the bells and whistles in Adobe Acrobat Viewer (like form filling), but then again, that is why it is so small and fast.

Give it a try and see if it does what you need - so far, it has exceeded all of my requirements and expectations!

P.S. I was using Foxit for a while, but had problems with it updating under Vista. Plus, all of the ads sort of soured me on the software.

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