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Hello,

Sumatra PDF has improved significantly with these recent updates. Prior to this, the updates had been sparse. Is this new and “focused” development going to continue or will it return to the same update frequency it has had for the past decade? I’m asking because I will soon start a new semester and would like to know if Sumatra PDF will be worth the investment? With investment I mean that almost every PDF editor has its own way of doing things, this usually presents as a problem when having to switch to another application. In Sumatra PDF, this would basically be that the favorite pages added are unable to be seen by Okular for example.

The recent updates have been very good, and if this continues Sumatra PDF will (for my needs at least) surpass Adobe’s PDF reader as well as Okular.

Some areas where potential improvements can be made include:

  1. Have the annotation editor open automatically (maybe with a pre selected size) when opening a PDF.

  2. Being able to search across the content of annotations.

  3. Being able to automatically make the annotated text become copied into the content (seen in the annotation editor). This, together with the ability to search across the annotations would be amazing.

  4. Being able to collapse annotations, so that perhaps each page of the PDF can be collapsed and later expanded to show every annotation for just that page, similar to how the bookmark and favorite pages work.

  5. Being able to sort annotations (by page, and maybe by color of the annotation). Currently, when adding a new annotation it gets added to the bottom of the list. This will get disruptive when one already has a lot of annotations, and then adds new ones, especially for longer books.

  6. My last suggestion is something I haven’t seen on a PDF program yet (and if it exists could someone please tell me). It would be to add tags (or any sort of custom distinguishing data) to annotations or to bookmarked/favorite pages. An example would be this: having annotated or favorited a lot of pages in a large textbook, and later reading another textbook. In this textbook you find something you quickly want to compare to the tagged annotation/page. In Sumatra PDF you can now see your favorited pages of all your PDFs when reading unrelated PDFs. You would then be able to select the tag that is related to the page you want to see, and later be able to select that page, go to it, compare and later return to where you were. I get that this basically sound like Zotero, but it would be amazing to have this feature when comparing text across several large textbooks, that cannot be given just a few tags to give an accurate representation of the whole body of work (as it would be done for a singular study).