Home / Compiling Sumatra PDF for Windows on ARM

I’m using a Windows based ARM device which I love as I spend most of my day away from a power point or Internet connection. The big downside is finding quality apps built for ARM. I can run 32 bit x86 apps but the performance (and reliability) trade off is huge so I avoid it as much as possible. I have Visual Studio installed on an x86 based machine and access to Ubuntu 20.04 on another machine and am hoping that I can build Sumatra PDF for ARM or ARM64. I haven’t successfully compiled anything complex in Visual Studio and I am hoping for some guidance. Some people were able to compile Sumatra PDF for ARM for jailbroken Windows RT devices and I would really appreciate some help doing the same for Windows 10 / ARM64.

I too would like to see that IoT possibility, but as an interpretive rather than compiled programmer am uncertain how many constraints need to be overcome. SumatraPDF depends heavily backend on 3rd party libs and frontend on GDI+. Certainly using an emulator such as Wine makes windows version functional but I never got there to test out printing or GhostScript interaction.

You could try to contact irony_delerium who seems to be the person who built Desktop PDF reader for WinRT (SumatraPDF) | XDA Developers Forums (xda-developers.com)

I would hope your header here may get replies but it may also be worth trying to contact others who are also attempting similar kernel mods
so looking at forks I see for linux see GitHub - yatli/sumatrapdf: SumatraPDF reader and for Arm
GitHub - ntw-au/sumatrapdf: SumatraPDF reader

Thanks for the reply. I noticed on a a thread which you replied to “Hacking Sumatra PDF 3.2 to work on WinXP & Server 2003 (x86/x64)” it was on @kjk list of things to do. He mentioned that he didn’t have a device to test it on. I’m not sure if I could help or not.

kjk is the one and only prime developer and for a living I believe works fulltime on other paid work. Whereas I (a forum mod) am occasionally earning enough peanuts to keep me “out to pasture”, neither of us is likely to spend much time on rebuilding Visual Studio to suit what MS see as low-revenue streams. Any fix to make current code work on XP32 is likely to eventually shatter. However, IoT x64 is supposed to be more likely to be supported (for a while at least)
For the record it was @SumatraPeter who raised the Armx64 question
You could try Contact Krzysztof Kowalczyk and see if posting him a device could trigger a new variant.

I am not sure of your target use since WoA (Win on Arm) seems to run SumatraPDF in the GUI version as an x32 App so I am guessing it is a different mix you are after ?

Yes SumartraPDF does run as a x86 32bit app but runs quite slow due to the need to use emulation and sometimes displays an error “Couldn’t render the page”. SumatraPDF is normally one of the fastest PDF viewers around and that is what I need for viewing complex CAD drawings. I’m happy to compile myself I just need a bit of help to do it. It would be even better if an ARM64 version could be released for download.

Someone started working on ARM build at GitHub - ntw-au/sumatrapdf: SumatraPDF reader
Not sure if they managed to complete it.

Thanks for letting me know (and for your work on Sumatra). I’ll see if I can compile it.