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Hell.. opening a PDF in Windows 8 is still a goddamn nightmare.

It is?

Foxit has became yet another bloated PDF reader with craps you don't need, SumatraPDF FTW.

Sumatra PDF is smaller/faster/opensourced.

Check out Sumatrapdf http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html. It's super fast and does not support javascript or actionscript in PDF's. I use it exclusively now.

Sumatra PDF used to be light, a mere 800 KB, I just installed the latest version, a whopping 3.6 MB. It's suffering the same form of featuritis as the other PDF readers I dumped because they became slow and unwieldy (Adobe and Foxit).

Check out Sumatrapdf http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html. It's super fast and does not support javascript or actionscript in PDF's. I use it exclusively now.

Is it vulnerable to font description overloading and the other PDF exploits out there? A large portion of the malicious PDFs I've seen lately didn't use forms or javascript containers as the main attack vector (usually shellcode via some markup bug).

Check out Sumatrapdf http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html. It's super fast and does not support javascript or actionscript in PDF's. I use it exclusively now.

It would be handy, if you actually wanted to produce pdf. Given that Adobe's pdf tools are what most people use, and that those are absolutely the largest vector for malware IN THE WORLD, I don't want any more pdf around.

Why is anyone using Adobe Reader anymore? There are several very nice alternatives, including Foxit, PDF-Xchange, Sumatra, Slim and others. I haven't used Adobe on any of my computers for years.

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html

You are welcome.

Sumatra doesn't seem to have a EULA at all.

You can change the yellow background using the -bg-color command line argument. For example: "C:\Program Files (x86)\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe" -bg-color 0x444444

It's described in the manual here.

If you're stuck on windows and are sick of Adobe and FoxIt (yes that's bloated now too), I recommend Sumatra. It's gotten really fast with launching and rendering now, and as a bonus will open your e-book formats which I find is a logical addition to a document viewer. As long as you don't actually need the Adobe magic forms, Sumatra is the better, sane solution to just view pdf's and similar.

I'm partial to SumatraPDF myself... lighter than foxit, without the installer grenade traps.

In related news, SumatraPDF, the primary open-source PDF viewer for Windows, just had its 1.4 release a couple of days ago. In the course of the past ~6 months they've added GDI support so documents can print quickly (rather than sending huge bitmaps to printers), improved performance in all sorts of ways (notably including much-faster zooming and searching), and quashed lots of bugs. They've also added a browser plugin and a Windows Search filter (both optional). So even if you've tried it in the past and it didn't meet your needs, it's likely worth trying again.

Outside of multimedia (e.g. Flash) and JS- both of which I've never seen used in a PDF for anything other than an exploit- the only thing Sumatra lacks at this point, AFAIK, is the ability to work well with forms.

I just spoke with my wife about her virus and suggested it might have come in through some rogue PDF document. She acknowledged that as a definite possibility; she's constantly downloading and reviewing scientific papers and the like -- a rogue PDF could have easily slipped into the pile somehow, theoretically. I advised that she switch to Sumatra PDF.

I tried a random sampling of the humongous archive.org pdfs you linked to in a prerelease version of Sumatra and had no crashes and fairly decent performance. Dealing with ridiculous zoom levels, especially on raster images, is something they've fixed only recently, and no software is going to have fantastic performance at upscaling raster images (try using a 1600% zoom in the Gimp, for instance)- hardware acceleration can help, but most viewers don't have it.

Raster scans are a terrible way to use PDF, which, as a page description language, was designed primarily for text and vector graphics (with the occasional raster illustration). You'll notice archive.org also provides them in DjVu, which is designed for scanned documents; the djvu versions are about 1/3 the size of the pdfs and render faster than any pdf viewer can render the pdfs.

Would you be willing to describe your other issues besides >400% zoom levels and/or see if your files are working better with a pre-1.3 version?

Without intending to start a flame war, I wish the programming side of computing was as interested in making things smaller and faster in code.

I don't think it's as bad as all that. Believe me, I would love it if all the software I used were trimmed-down and brilliantly optimized. There is indeed quite a lot of software that is bloated and slow. But it really just comes down to value propositions: is it worth the effort (in programming time, testing, etc.)? For companies, it comes down to whether making the software faster will bring in more sales. For many products, it won't bring in new sales (as compared to adding some new feature), so they don't bother.

But in places where it does matter, there actually is some good competition. In browser rendering, for instance, the big players are all competing to improve performance (e.g. Mozilla). Think even of something as horribly inefficient as Adobe Acrobat Reader... It's inefficiency has in fact led to the creation of lighter-weight alternatives (e.g. Sumatra or FoxIt). Another example is in graphics: there are all kinds of brilliant and powerful algorithms and optimizations working in modern software to make the slick graphics we now take for granted.

In an ideal world, every piece of software would be crafted to perfection, and would ship as a perfectly secure, extremely small chunk of code that runs blazingly fast because of the thousands of meticulous assembly-level optimizations that were performed. Reality falls short. But, on the other hand, our modern computers are really quite functional and fast. So I would say we should keep putting pressure on vendors to ship faster software, to the extent that we notice the slowness and it bothers us... but we should also acknowledge the real effort that is going into optimization all the time.

You could try sumatra, which is GPLed and about as lightweight as evice.

Sumatra PDF

Sumatra is my PDF reader of choice now. The program consists of a single executable, it's open source and GPL'ed. As long as you all you need to do is load and read PDFs (imagine that, a PDF reader that just reads PDFs), it gets the job done beautifully.

I agree, but the chances of Joe Average User, and let's face it, most of us as well, inspecting the source code for the majority of the applications they use is low. Changing to Foxit still represents a vast improvement in security.

That said, use SumatraPDF. It's probably not as polished as Foxit, but it suits my purposes for most things, and it's licensed GPLv3.

Sumatra PDF doesn't have cut and paste, but it has:
<Ctrl> + Left Mouse: select text and copy to clipboard
From the manual.

Actually it does do cut and paste. Well, rather it does copy, and then you can paste where you like.
From the Sumatra PDF manual:

<Ctrl> + Left Mouse: select text and copy to clipboard

Sure it ain't exactly obvious. But if only you would RTFM! :p.

For the 90% of us who don't require all the minutiae of functionality and cruft which Adobe Reader offers, there are options. Obviously Mac folk are covered by Apple's built in Preview, but on Windows, Sumatra PDF is amazing and ridiculously small. It's better than Foxit, in my opinion, for barebones PDF viewing in Windows. Check it out! http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html

Or Sumatra, so you don't have give yet more info to google.

Foxit is just as bloated as Adobe. Use Sumatra.

Does anyone know if Sumatra PDF is vulnerable?

I stopped using Foxit because of its frequent crashes and annoying updater, and I only use Acrobat for printing.

Have you tried SumatraPDF? I use it for reading PDF files and while it is somewhat ugly it's atleast fast and updated regularly. I cannot say whether it is affected by this bug/feature or not, though, haven't checked yet.

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html

Sumatra appears to not support this "feature". Windows only sadly.

You most certainly can get rid of that monster. Go get Sumatra PDF. 1.2 MB of joy.

If you want a dumb reader, my I suggest Sumatra PDF.
It's the best one I've found yet.

Or check out the Alternativeto.net page for Acrobat and find your own.

Scilab numerical algebra system
unxutils native ports of some unix utilities to Win32
speedcrunch calculator
vim better than emacs
Sumatra PDF fast clean pdf viewer

Dont use Acrobat... There are several alternatives available all less bloated:

GPL'd PDF reader: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html

Commercial: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

I also used to use Foxit, but found an even more lightweight reader in the form of Sumatra PDF:

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html

For the 99% of us that only read PDF docs, it's the fastest and least resource hungry PDF viewer I've ever used, plus the benefit of open sauce. IIRC even Foxit's fallen foul of some of the same vulns as acrobat.

FYI I've also got a full fledged version of Acrobat for when I do tech writing or annotate some of our existing docs, and I've never noticed any difference between the presentation of sumatra and acrobat, nor any problems with stupid forms (although they didn't use JS). Recommend everyone gives it a whirl even if just to find out whether they can live without bells and whistles.

Tip: to get it to remember your default view (fit width, continuous in my instance) open sumatra, set your preferences and then those sumatra. Otherwise it remembers individual view settings based on the file path.

Or Sumatra PDF, which doesn't try and get the user update to the for-pay registered version.

In Windows, I like Sumatra. It's smaller and faster than Foxit, and doesn't allow javascript and crap that causes problems in Adobe Reader. It does, however, sometimes have trouble rendering some more complicated pdf's, but you could always keep foxit around for that rare occasion.

Very true. Since you didn't provide more info (and the program is excellent), here's the good stuff: SumatraPDF is a really good value considering the tiny footprint (a measly 1.2 MB installer, same size installed.) No way to run JS, so you're perfectly safe from any attacks that have something to do with PDF scripting vulnerabilities. Memory footprint, startup and performance are as good as you'd expect for this size, and you can't possibly call it "bloated" in terms of interface by any measure. For those of us that do LaTeX, this is *the* PDF viewer of choice when working. On the bad side, it's Windows-only (never tried to run it under Linux, but there you have much more to choose from, so no issue really). Rendering is also somewhat suboptimal compared to Adobe (in terms of antialiasing), but some images look actually better than in Reader. The website might also use some work, especially changing the obnoxious yellow, but maybe it's just me.

Sumatra PDF Do I want to trust something that comes from "blog.kowalczyk.info"?

Oh, I don't know.. Depends whether you trust FSF then. Trust hierarchy:
http://www.fsf.org/
http://www.fsfeurope.org/
http://pdfreaders.org/
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html

You surely won't find problem discovering the links between those sites, as it took me no more than two minutes.

For what it's worth, I use SumatraPDF for my LaTeX writings, as it's extremely small and fast, and renders some images better than Adobe Reader.

I used to use Foxit, but got a little tired of its adware nature (banner ad, browser toolbar, tons of buttons that only exist to remind you what the free version doesn't have, etc.). So I switched to Sumatra (GPL and much more minimalistic than Foxit). Later, I started taking notes in class using PDF comments. I tried using Foxit again, but commenting is restricted to the Pro version. Plus it crashed every second time I tried to comment the DRM'd lecture notes (that was difficult to figure out since Foxit doesn't indicate if DRM is present). So I switched to PDF-XChange Viewer since it can handle DRM and allows comments. It's similar to Foxit in that it's adware and feature-rich, but it does it with a bit more class IMHO. E.g. there's an option to hide the "Professional" features. Plus, there's a portable version.

Foxit recently had a stack based buffer overflow that could lead to account exploitation. But the worst problem is that Foxit is proprietary software; uninspectable, unfixable by even the most technical user, and Foxit is unsharable to users "on mobile devices or embedded devices including cellular phones, PDA's, and all other handheld devices". Just like with Adobe's proprietary PDF reader, the secrecy means that there's no telling how many other security problems are waiting to be exploited with Foxit. As more problems are found you must wait for the proprietor to decide to fix the problem and distribute that fix. If the program spies on you (or allows others to do so) you can only turn that off if the proprietor decides to allow you to turn that off. Foxit is not a secure program because of the restrictions it imposes on the user regardless of its current or future implementation. Sumatra PDF overcomes all of these limitations and if you don't think something in it is secure, you are allowed to fix it yourself, hire someone to fix it for you, or ask someone for a fix and then share the improved version with anyone even commercially. Sumatra PDF is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

Link: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html

Whilst Foxit is an improvement over Adobe's bloatware on Windows, if you want to really go light and lean try an open source alternative.

Sumatra

I'm told that SumatraPDF is available for Microsoft Windows users. SumatraPDF is licensed under the GNU GPL v2 and it runs with WINE. However I don't choose to use Microsoft Windows or any other proprietary software on my system at home. I use GNU/Linux with free software PDF readers.

Have you tried Sumatra?

IMHO, Sumatra is to Foxit what Foxit is to Adobe Bloatreader.

Even Foxit has annoying advertisements in it that wont' stay turned off.

It might be missing some of the features you're looking for (I don't know what you need), but Sumatra is tiny, extremely fast, and open source.

Sumatra PDF Reader is Open Source, less than half the size of Foxit (1/15th the size of Acrobat) and has search, text-read, copy-paste, and plenty of keyboard shortcuts. It's very quick and streamlined and makes Foxit look bloated in comparison.

Right now it's windows only, unfortunately.

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html

...then I remembered that I use Sumatra PDF

Seen Sumatra PDF?

Thank you very much.

Creative Commons publishes many licenses which are very different. Therefore, to say that a work âoeuses a Creative Commons licenseâ is to leave the principal questions about the work's licensing unanswered. When you see such a statement in a work, please ask the author to highlight the substance of the license choices. And if someone proposes to âoeuse a Creative Commons licenseâ for a certain work, it is vital to ask immediately, âoeWhich one?â

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#which-cc

I actually go further than these folks, I say "don't use any CC licence".

Copyright 2008 apathy maybe
You are free to use and modify this work, for any purpose, in any medium with the following condition:
This entire licence text is retained and applies to any copy and/or modification.

Simple, to the point, and does the job. Isn't wrapped in legalise, won't confuse anyone and applies no matter where in the world you are.

As I've said before, Creative Commons encourages people not to understand what they are doing. It provides everyone with a simplistic "non-legal" text. For example, even when I just "selected" a licence, it directed me to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ which doesn't contain the full text. If I just use that, I don't know what "rights" I'm giving up! It is only when I go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode that I find this great bit of text... (emphasis added):

Except as otherwise agreed in writing by the Licensor or as may be otherwise permitted by applicable law, if You Reproduce, Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work either by itself or as part of any Adaptations or Collections, You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author's honor or reputation. Licensor agrees that in those jurisdictions (e.g. Japan), in which any exercise of the right granted in Section 3(b) of this License (the right to make Adaptations) would be deemed to be a distortion, mutilation, modification or other derogatory action prejudicial to the Original Author's honor and reputation, the Licensor will waive or not assert, as appropriate, this Section, to the fullest extent permitted by the applicable national law, to enable You to reasonably exercise Your right under Section 3(b) of this License (right to make Adaptations) but not otherwise.

Not only is it hard to read (and legal texts don't have to be hard to read), it is putting restrictions upon anyone using the work that I find unacceptable.

Fuck off with "Creative Commons" shit.

(The licence that the book is published under is http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ which has the same clause.)

----

On PDF: Sumatra, FLOSS PDF reading software for MS Windows.

Foxit FTL.

Sumatra PDF Viewer FTW.

Foxit is about as bloated and irritating as Acrobat Reader was in version 5.0 (which was much better, but still terrible).

Sumatra is to Foxit as Foxit is to Adobe Acrobat Reader.

I realize being a .info site makes it very suspicious, but if you don't trust me or it, Google it yourself

Another option for PDF reading on Windows is Sumatra PDF (if you prefer open-source).

There are alternatives for Windows as well that are better than the "official" reader.

Specifically Sumatra PDF and Foxit Reader are alternative PDF readers for Windows.

They are both orders-of-magnitude faster than Adobe Acrobat. Part of the reason for this speed boost is that they don't implement the hundreds of plug-ins that Acrobat supports. But frankly for >99% of the PDFs you encounter, those additional plug-ins are not required. (In the rare case where a PDF needs one of those features, I guess you can load up Acrobat.)

In addition to a speed advantage, using an alternate PDF reader is probably more secure. Both because it is less well-known (fewer exploits tailored to it), and because they don't implement those hundreds of plug-ins (some of which enable certain kinds of code execution).