The Portable Document Format, which you know simply as PDF, is in fact a very good format for documents mainly due to four facts:
- They’re usually significantly smaller compared to a DOC (especially if there are images within).
- They look exactly the same no matter what OS you use.
- It is true WYSIWYG concerning printers. What you see on screen is precisely what will print out on paper.
- The likelihood of a PDF containing a virus and/or malicious scripting is slim to none. Not impossible, but highly unlikely.
Before getting into SumatraPDF and why I think it’s the best PDF viewer ever, here’s an explanation of why we hate PDF.
What we hate about PDFs aren’t the files themselves, but the reader applications.
I wholly believe that Adobe Reader is evil. Very evil. Why? Well, first of all it’s a 26MB installer file. For a document reader? Yes. What’s in that 26MB? A whole lot of crap you don’t need.
The crapola starts even before you download the file. You specifically have to uncheck a box so you don’t download the "Free McAfee Security Scan."
The Adobe Reader installer as far as I’m concerned tries every way to hijack your web browser by installing a ton of useless garbage. You have to go through the installation procedure very s-l-o-w-l-y, else it will put install a plugin in all your browsers. What happens after that is that on any attempt to load a PDF from a web page, all this CRAP loads up from Adobe Reader asking you a whole bunch of questions on first run, and worst of all loads the PDF directly in the browser. This absolutely scares the daylights out of people because they think the browser is crashing due to the fact Reader is so bloated, huge and takes forever even to get started. And in some instances the browser does crash because of Adobe Reader.
Adobe Reader is evil. Period.
The significantly smaller FoxIt Reader was a good alternative. But now it has promotional banner graphics inside the reader. Evil. And it tries to do the same browser hijack crap Adobe Reader does. Eeeevil. And you now have to very s-l-o-w-l-y go through the installation process just like with Adobe to make sure a bunch of crap (like, oh, I dunno, a useless toolbar) doesn’t get installed. Eeeeeeeeeevil.
FoxIt Reader is now also evil. Sad but true.
Going PDF reader-less
I hated PDF readers so much that I simply uninstalled them and used Google Docs to read my PDF files. That system reads them easily – but with one huge drawback: It’s not the easiest thing in the world to print a PDF out of Google Docs. You’re better off printing direct from a PDF document reader.
Enter SumatraPDF
SumatraPDF has an installer that is only 1.4MB in size. It is free and open source. It does not have any stupid toolbar installers in it. It does not try to hijack your web browsers. The only thing it will ask you is if you want it to be the default reader for PDF files – that’s it.
It is wonderful. All I ever wanted was to just view the PDFs I download, and that’s exactly what SumatraPDF does with no fuss whatsoever.
Can SumatraPDF read all PDF files? Mostly. The only ones it would have a problem with are the super-advanced type with intricate fill-in forms and whatnot. But other than that it will happily read just about any PDF file you load into it.
Example: Let’s say you downloaded Form W-4 from the IRS, which happens to be a PDF:
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf
In SumatraPDF:
Loads perfectly. Prints perfectly. And that’s all you ever want out of a PDF document reader.
The only thing you ever hated about PDF files were the readers needed to view them. But after using SumatraPDF, you’ll happily dump FoxIt and Adobe to the curb.
SumatraPDF is the best PDF viewer ever because it opens PDF files with zero hassle and does so lightning quick; that’s why it’s the best (on Windows).
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