Robert Irvine recommends new programs that won’t cost you a thing
PDF VIEWER Sumatra PDF 3.5
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What you need: Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11
Sumatra PDF has long been one of our favourite PDF tools. It’s simpler and less bloated than the likes of Adobe Acrobat Reader but more versatile than the PDF viewers built into browsers. Its first major update for over a year brings a raft of new features and improvements that make Sumatra an even better and faster way to read PDF files and other formats, including MOBI (ebooks), CBZ/CBR (comic books) and – as of this version – the new image format AVIF.
Sumatra PDF 3.5 sees the long-awaited addition of a dark mode to make viewing PDFs easier on your eyes, especially at night. To activate this, click the three-line menu button in the top-left corner and choose Settings, then Theme. Select either Dark or Darker to apply dark mode to Sumatra’s interface, then press I to invert the colours of the current PDF.
Sumatra now lets you add annotations to PDFs by right-clicking the document and choosing ‘Create Annotation Under Cursor’, then either Text, Free Text or Stamp. Type the comment you want to appear in the annotation and click ‘Save changes to existing PDF’ or ‘Save changes to new PDF’ (to create an annotated copy). To move an annotation, press Ctrl and click it, then drag it to the desired position.
Other welcome changes allow you to drag out a PDF’s tab to open the file in a new window; switch between tabs by pressing Ctrl and Page Up or Page Down; and reopen closed tabs by pressing Ctrl+Shift+T – just like in your web browser.
There’s also a new Clear History command you can use to delete thumbnails of the PDFs you’ve been viewing from Sumatra’s Home tab. Press Ctrl+K to open the Command Palette and select Clear History in the long list of commands.
This is the first version of the program to offer a build for 64bit ARM processors.
1 Sumatra PDF features tabs just like a web browser, so you can easily switch between multiple files. The Home tab shows thumbnails of the PDFs you frequently read, and you can now drag other tabs into new windows.
2 To use the new annotations feature, right-click a PDF and choose ‘Create Annotation Under Cursor’. Click ‘Text’ to insert an icon indicating an annotation, Free Text to add the annotation to the PDF itself or Stamp to insert a stamp, such as ‘PAID’.
3 Type the text for the annotation into the box that opens. You can change the t
