Hacker News Reader

Comment by tybris | Hacker News Reader

When I read that comment I decided it was time to uninstall Adobe Reader and found it was taking up 145MB of disk space. Many thoughts went through my mind. Maybe there was whole virtual civilization in there and I just wiped it out. Maybe Adobe Reader is skynet and I'm John Connor. Maybe it was time to find a new PDF viewer.

My first try was Foxit. I found its short name promising. The installer confused me with talks of Javascript and safe mode, did not look good. First paper I opened crashed the program. *sigh. Sumatra was had the colourful charm of the web in the 90s. I was almost ready to give up the resistance. I took a deep breath and clicked the link of the installer. Before the next breath it was installed and I was opening PDFs that looked just fine.

TL;DR remove adobe reader, install Sumatra

View on HN

Yeah, Foxit is getting pretty bloated too. My PDF reader of choice on Windows now is Evince. It may not look pretty, but it's fast and lightweight without any fluff.

I've no problems with its looks, but is there a way to not start with "fit page width" and therefore a bigger window? I always have to resize and change the modus which is unpleasant. (on Windows) Thanks in advance!

It's open source; you can probably just tweak a global variable somewhere :P

ACtually you don't need to install another app... Once you removed Reader, just set the pdf filetype to always be opened by GoogleChrome. It views, prints, and it's blazing fast

Google chrome viewer looks promising, but also crashes for me on some PDFs.

> TL;DR remove adobe reader, install Sumatra

... Try to print anything... Remove Sumatra... Install Adobe Reader.

Print?

Sumatra is a good application choice for safety, but be aware - the printing support is either really bad or non functional depending on the document.

I moved to Sumatra PDF many moons ago and have never looked back. It is like the Google Chrome of PDF viewers.

I'm honestly interested... Was that intended to be a subtle joke or a serious analogy?

I was actually serious. When Chrome came out I left Firefox since Chrome was so much faster on my PC. Same thing with Sumatra. I guess the analogy would work well for those who had a similar experience with Chrome. :)

That much I guessed. I just wondered if you realised that Chrome itself has a PDF viewer built-in these days, making Google Chrome the Google Chrome of PDF readers. :-)

That certainly makes a good joke. :-) But no, I didn't have that in mind.

Yep. Sumatra is great for snappy viewing. But do not print! What it does is convert whole pages in bitmaps and chokes the memory and the network.

I would strong recommend PDF-Xchange. I was a heavy Foxit user, but then it became bloated too and Sumatra lacks some features like highlighting and commenting.

I really like PDF-XChange. It's fast, prints well, has multiple tab and extra editing stuff like stamps and adding text (which I never use).

Isn't okular available for windows, although you probably have to install a decent amount of kde libraries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com