Sumatra PDF is snappy and opens to display a clean and simple interface. That’s why you will find it to be a part of many portable apps packages like Portable Apps and LiberKey. That makes it perfect to be carried around in a USB drive. The portable install of Sumatra PDF is a single file without any dependencies. You can also preview LaTeX (an academic format) documents.

You can use it to open PDF, DjVu, EPUB, XPS, CHM, CBZ and CBR and MOBI files, which pretty much covers the popular eBook formats. Sumatra PDF is an open source viewer for Windows (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7). I just started with it so that I can illustrate the appeal of portable software that are lightweight and do their core jobs well. Of course, the Davids of the PDF world cannot be compared to the Goliaths like Adobe when it comes to a face-off. I just checked…Sumatra PDF is taking up around 4 MB of my HDD space.

Compare that with the thirty minutes it takes for downloading the Adobe Reader installer. It took me five seconds to download the zipped file of Sumatra PDF, a free portable PDF and eBook reader.

Sumatra pdf reader download