SumatraPDF v3.3 Release

I have not been more excited than having version 3.3 of SumatraPDF being made available. It's not because of the performance updates, the changed toolbar with added functionalities and what-not.

It's because Alt-Space finally pulls up the standard Windows 10 system menu after being broken in version 3.2 that was released a year and change ago.

I know it looks very silly to be excited about a bug-fix of this nature, but before I go into it, let me sidetrack on the whole issue of PDF readers.

Back in the day, I relied heavily on the Adobe Acrobat Reader for all my PDF reading needs. It was a good enough reader for the most part, a type of baseline standard no thanks to it being from the company that effectively defined the PDF file format. However, even as early as the mid-2000s I was getting frustrated with its clunky loading speed, as well as the trend towards ever-increasing sizes of the toolbar, reducing the amount of space actually needed to display the PDF document. That's when I discovered Foxit Reader. Apart from an opt-out advertisement option, it was speedier than the Acrobat Reader, and supported tabs, which fit my LaTeX work-flow super well.

But eventually, even Foxit Reader started to suck, because their advertising was getting harder to opt out of. The bloat was getting real, and the start-up speed was starting to reach the levels of the Acrobat Reader, i.e. slow. That was when I discovered SumatraPDF. It ticked all the boxes that was important for me---speedy start-up, good rendering capabilities including the ability to view stupid large PDF files that even Acrobat Reader had trouble loading, let alone display(!), and it had no sneaky advertising/potential malware entry points.

And from then, SumatraPDF has been my go to Windows-based PDF reader. I don't talk about Linux ones because there are just so many to go to: Evince, Okular, and the old stalwart Xpdf. They are all free and run super fast, and thus there isn't much to talk about, really. Many of the Windows-based PDF readers don't have ports to Linux, but really, it isn't a problem.

Anyway, SumatraPDF has been my PDF work horse. As for the Alt-Space, I use that a lot when I'm operating in Windows just so that I can do the window maximise command of Alt-Space, X. It's a much faster way to do it than to reach out for the mouse to click on the relevant icon---long-time readers will know that I am a keyboard jockey, and thus this functionality is quite important. To be fair, these days I tend to use Win-Left or Win-Right more---these are keyboard commands that change the window size and position to either cover the left half or the right half of the screen respectively. However, due to some weird silliness in the logic that I still haven't bothered to figure out, that behaviour isn't consistent unless the window is first maximised---hence the importance of the Alt-Space keyboard shortcut.

SumatraPDF version 3.2 not having that was an irritation point for me for quite a while. That it was fixed and released in version 3.3 has made me very happy.

Alright, that's all I have for now. Till the next update.