Keyboard shortcuts

  • Ctrl+Left Mouse - select a text on a page and copy to clipboard. Use Ctrl-V to paste it in other programs
  • space - scroll by screen
  • backspace - scroll back by screen
  • j - scroll by one line
  • k - scroll back by one line
  • Down - scroll by one line
  • Up - scroll back by one line
  • n - goto next page
  • p - goto previous page
  • Page Down - go to next page
  • Page Up - go to previous page
  • Ctrl-F - find text
  • F3 - find next
  • Shift-F3 - find previous
  • Ctrl-L - fullscreen
  • F11 - fullscreen
  • g - goto page
  • q - quit
  • + - zoom in
  • - - zoom out
  • r - reload PDF document
  • <Shift> <Ctrl> + - rotate clockwise
  • <Shift> <Ctrl> - - rotate counter-clockwise
  • Home - go to first page
  • End - go to last page

Command-line arguments

  • -esc-to-exit - if given, ESC key will exit the program. It's persistent in settings file, so it only needs to be provided once.
  • -bgcolor $color - change the yellow background color to a provided color in hex format (e.g. 0xffff00)
  • -print-to-default FILE_NAME.PDF - prints a given PDF to a default printer
  • -print-to PRINTER_NAME FILE_NAME.PDF - prints a given PDF to a printer named PRINTER_NAME
  • -exit-on-print - when -print-to-default or -print-to is used, will exit after printing

Note: printing is experimental and not well tested.

Disable viewing PDF files directly in web browser (IE and FireFox)

Adobe Acrobat also comes with Internet Explorer and FireFox plugin which makes it take over PDF files downloaded via browser and display them directly in the browser. This is not always a desired behaviour and you can use Sumatra as the default PDF viewer in both IE and Firefox, without completely uninstalling Adobe Acrobat. Here are the steps (based on this blog post):
  • Launch Sumatra PDF viewer
  • Select File/Make Sumatra a default PDF reader
  • Launch Adobe Acrobat
  • Select Edit/Preferences
  • Select Internet
  • Uncheck Display PDF in browser
  • Click OK
You generally don't have to restart your computer after the installation is complete.

After doing this, clicking on links to PDF documents will no longer open the embedded viewer, but will pop up a dialog box. Check the "Always perform this action..." checkbox on the dialog, and Sumatra will automatically open the next time a PDF link is selected.

If those instructions don't work, you can always try this method.

Sumatra is written by Krzysztof Kowalczyk