SumatraPDF portable

Portable vs installer

The portable version is a self-contained executable that does not require installation. You can copy it to any folder or new computer, or put it on a USB drive, and it works there.

The installer version also includes:

PdfPreview.dll : provides OS-level previews and thumbnails (e.g. in Explorer) for supported file formats
PdfFilter.dll : provides OS-level search within supported files (e.g. PDF and EPUB files)
libsumatrapdf.dll : for technical reasons, the application must be split into libsumatrapdf.dll (core functionality) and SumatraPDF.exe to make PdfPreview.dll and PdfFilter.dll work
sumatrapdf-tool.exe : command-line tool for performing operations on PDF files. You can also run the same commands as SumatraPDF.exe <tool> without extracting this file

You can extract these files with the -x command-line option. Use -d <dir> to extract them to a given directory.

Before 3.7, the DLL was called libmupdf.dll.

Before 3.7, the portable version was a separate executable that contained the engine code.

In 3.7, we simplified the distribution. The portable version is the same executable as the installer.

You can install it with the -install command-line option or run it as a portable executable.

When the executable has -install in its name, we assume it’s intended to be run as an installer.

Because of technical limitations in Windows, the combined portable and installer executable must extract libsumatrapdf.dll to disk. The location is an implementation detail, currently %LOCALAPPDATA%\SumatraPDF-data\<build-id>\libsumatrapdf.dll. If you prefer, you can place the DLL next to the SumatraPDF.exe executable.

Data storage (SumatraPDF-settings.txt etc.):

in portable mode, application data is stored next to SumatraPDF.exe
when installed, it is stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\SumatraPDF
you can override the location with the -appdata <dir> command-line option