Weekend came, weekend went but what it left is another release of SumatraPDF - my humble reader for PDF files.

This release adds some of the most requested (in the forums) features and fixes.

This is the first release to have printing, a feature contributed in great part by Omar. It had limited testing (there are only so many pages I’m willing to print).

It has improved support for portable usage (i.e. running off of e.g. USB drive). When it detects it’s not running from Program Files directory, it assumes portable usage and doesn’t write any files or registry items on the computer. It writes its preferences files in the same directory as the executable. Because of that I changed the name of preferences file from prefs.txt to sumatrapdfprefs.txt, to make it clear it is related to Sumatra. Unfortunate side effect is that settings from 0.3 will be lost.

It no longer blindly registers itself as a default handler for PDF files. It asks the user nicely first.

Under the covers a lot of effort went into supporting alternative PDF rendering engine. This new engine is significantly faster than poppler so I’ve enabled it by default. You can switch back to poppler by unchecking menu item.

And a bunch of fixes, most of them reported at some point on those forums:

A side effect of using new engine is that support for link inside PDF files was disabled. Well, one more reason to wait for the next version…