SumatraPDF has just become a very strong contender as an everyday PDF viewer on Windows. The reason: it finally supports searching and bookmarks in version 0.8.
Its interface is still a bit over simplistic, but it’s already quite good for everyday uses. At the moment, the keyboard shortcuts are not very well-documented. Looking at the source code, I noticed some missing entries that are noteworthy:
- The search interface:
/starts a search, so asCtrl-F.Ctrl-GandF3is next, andShift-F3is previous. Note that the toolbar doesn’t have to be visible for the search keys to work. Ctrl-Ltoggles full screen mode.F12toggles the bookmark panel.
(Update: Also note that Ctrl-Drag will select a region and copy its text to clipboard.)
I don’t have a list of the numerous PDF viewers on Windows here: a google search will get you many hits. Personally, I have “switched” to SumatraPDF on my browsers a few months ago, while spending most of my “PDF time” in PDF-XChange Viewer (see this post about its annotation capability).
I still keep Adobe Reader 8 as the default PDF handler: in terms of printing, anti-aliasing and javascript support, I have yet to see any competition to Adobe. However, now that PDF is in the process of becoming an ISO standard and FSF is declaring the GNU PDF project as one of the few high priority projects, hopefully we will see some change in a few years (see this linux.com article).
I should note that SumatraPDF 0.8 is still missing hyperlink support. Also, none of Windows PDF viewers seems to support pdfsync (round-tripping between PDF and TeX source). I know the former is being worked on. The latter, hmm…
P.S. Common PDF viewers on Windows also include Ghostview and Foxit Reader.
Another feature missing from every pdf viewer I’ve tried (except ghostview) is automatic refresh of a changed file. At least most of them (except Adobe’s reader) don’t lock the file, but automatic refresh would be nice. Unless I’m missing something, Sumatra doesn’t address this.
I have implemented the autorefresh and pdfsync inverse-search features for SumatraPDF. The changes have been submitted to the SVN repository on Google Code.
A binary file is available at: http://william.famille-blum.org/software/sumatra/SumatraPDF-sync.exe
See also the forum posts:
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/forum_sumatra/topic.php?TopicId=864&Posts=4
and
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/forum_sumatra/topic.php?TopicId=868&Posts=0
William Blum’s latest implementation on SumatraPDF works like a charm (with Miktex 2.7 using Synctex) for continuous previewing with pdflatex. Use that with a slightly modified original latexmk script, it becomes a great combo. Forward and Inverse search works better than any other viewer I’ve used with my editor, definitely worth giving a try.