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, put it on a USB drive, and it will just work.

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 exactly 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, this dual-purpose portable/installer executable must extract libsumatrapdf.dll to disk. The location is an implementation detail: %LOCALAPPDATA%\SumatraPDF-data\<build-id>\libsumatrapdf.dll. If you prefer, you can place it 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