When comparing Sumatra PDF vs qpdfview, the Slant community recommends Sumatra PDF for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF readers?” Sumatra PDF is ranked 2nd while qpdfview is ranked 7th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Starts quickly
Pro Free and open source
Sumatra is available for free, licensed under GPL with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Low resource usage
Pro Does not have heavy editor features
Annotations and other heavy features are just not needed in reader.
Pro Extensive keyboard shortcuts
Pro Elegant interface
Pro Portable
The application consists of a single file that can be run without installation. You can put it on an external device, such as an usb thumb stick and run it on any Windows machine from the thumb stick.
Pro Multilingual
It's available in 69 languages.
Pro Low on resources
Pro Reloads on changes instantly
Pro Outline, properties and thumbnail panes
Pro Open multiple pdfs in tabs
qpdfview is a tabbed document viewer.
Pro Allows for some scripting
Opens files in named instances, open files on designated page.
Calling of userscripts on a document is thus far not possible.
Pro Fast search in all opened files
Pro Dark mode
However only inverted colors.
Pro Scale, rotate and fit
Pro Supports TOC-sidebar
Pro Switch tabs with keyboard shortcuts
Pro Continuous and multiple-page layouts
Pro Add highlights and text annotations
Pro DjVu support
Pro Fullscreen and presentation views
Pro PostScript support
Pro Custom background colors
Pro Multiplatform
It is available on any major computer OS.
Pro Deactivation of GUI elements
e.g.:
toggleMenuBar
toggleToolBars
Pro Supports thumbnail preview
Pro Input forms are editable
Cons
Con Windows only
Con Lacking in features
Sumatra aims for simplicity at the expense of functionality. For example, there's no way to annotate PDFs or edit them.
Con Fonts are not smooth enough
Not as smooth as e.g. Adobe Reader. No anti-aliasing
Con Cannot crop empty fields
Just got used to this killing feature on Goodreader on Mac.
Con Deadly slow on complex pdf files
Con File information missing page size
Con No multiple mapping of commands
For example:
moveDown=Down
moveLeft=Shift+Left
moveRight=Shift+Right
moveUp=Up
Having two key mappings to execute the moveUp command doesn't seem to be possible.
Con Configuration intended via GUI
There is no explicit documentation of configuration parameters used in qpdfview.conf and shortcuts.conf (those are the most important ones). However the files are editable conveniently, which is of value.