Thursday, September 10, 2009

Sumatra: Quick PDF viewer for Windows


If you use pdfLaTeX under Windows, you are maybe tired of waiting Acrobat reader to open, each time you compile your document and want to check the preview. I like Acrobat for its professional features but I rarely need them. For all other occasions where I just want to quickly check a PDF file, Acrobat is just a pain to launch.
I have tested FoxReader in the past but I was not fullt happy with it. I think that I have now found the perfect quick PDF reader, thanks to a post in the Lyx's users-forum: Sumatra PDF Reader. It has even a full screen mode that works quite well (even Acrobat's better fills the screen). It gets along quite well with any LaTeX editor (Lyx, TexMaker, Scientific Word, etc.).
It is also quite easy to drive using keyboard shortcuts, as you can learn this in the "manual".