Okular vs Sumatra PDF

Okular and Sumatra PDF are, in essence, two peculiar entities that serve the noble purpose of displaying documents without setting the world on fire. They are both free, open-source and remarkably good at handling PDFs, EPUBs and DjVus without much fuss. If you need to highlight something, bookmark a page or generally poke at a document without actually rewriting history, they’ve got you covered. What they won’t do is let you edit PDFs in the grand, sweeping manner of an overzealous novelist, but then again, neither will most free things in life.

Okular, born into the vast and sprawling KDE ecosystem in 2007, is the sort of software that likes to think of itself as sophisticated. It dabbles in digital signatures, form-filling and generally making itself useful to people who enjoy reading long, complicated papers about things like quantum physics or tax law. It also runs happily on Linux, Windows and even macOS, which makes it more of a well-traveled academic than a stay-at-home recluse. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys having buttons that do things, Okular is likely to keep you entertained for quite some time.

Sumatra PDF, on the other hand, was forged in Poland in 2006 and has taken minimalism to such an extreme that it practically evaporates when you’re not looking at it. It is lightweight, blazingly fast and has precisely zero interest in things like digital signatures or form-filling. Its main purpose is to open PDFs, let you read them and then politely step out of the way without cluttering your life with unnecessary distractions—like features. If you just want to read a document without engaging in a long-term relationship with it, Sumatra PDF is your perfect match.

See also: Top 10 PDF Readers