Sumatra PDF is written mainly by two contributors: Krzysztof Kowalczyk and Simon Bünzli. Since version 0.9.4, Sumatra supports the JPEG 2000 format.

Sumatra supports SyncTeX, a bidirectional method to synchronize TeX source and PDF output produced by pdfTeX or XeTeX. Sumatra is multilingual, with 69 community-contributed translations. Since version 0.9.1, hyperlinks embedded in PDF documents have been supported. This resulted in very large spool files and slow printing. Through version 1.1, printing was achieved by rasterizing each PDF page to a bitmap. Other open-source readers like Okular and Evince make this optional, and Debian patches software to remove these restrictions, in accord with its principles of interoperability and re-use. Kowalczyk stated 'I decided that will honor PDF creator's wishes'. The PDF format's use restrictions were implemented in Sumatra 0.6, preventing users from printing or copying from documents that the document author restricts, a form of Digital Rights Management. In January, 2017, the latest version of SumatraPDF, 3.1.2, had a single 6.1 Mb executable file in comparison, Adobe Reader XI used 320 MB of disk space. In 2009, Sumatra 1.0 had a 1.21 MB setup file, compared to Adobe Reader 9.5's 32 MB. Īs is characteristic of many portable applications, Sumatra uses little disk space.

This classifies it as a portable application to read PDF, XPS, DjVu, CHM, eBooks (ePub and Mobi) and Comic Book (CBZ and CBR) formats. Sumatra was designed for portable use, as it consists of one file with no external dependencies, making it usable from an external USB drive, needing no installation. For rendering PDFs, it uses the MuPDF library. Sumatra has a minimalist design, with its simplicity attained at the cost of extensive features. It is developed exclusively for Microsoft Windows.

If Ghostscript is installed, it supports PostScript files. Sumatra PDF is a free and open-source document viewer that supports many document formats including: Portable Document Format (PDF), Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM), DjVu, EPUB, FictionBook (FB2), MOBI, PRC, Open XML Paper Specification (OpenXPS, OXPS, XPS), and Comic Book Archive file (CB7, CBR, CBT, CBZ).

Sumatra pdf macos