While looking over some typical engrish product documentation from a manhole in China (yes, a manhole) I tried to copy and paste from the constantly deteriorating Foxit Reader. Let me first say, foxit, your software is good. I was an avid fan before you started whacking a whole bunch of features in, now you are Adobe Reader 2.0.

The first thing I noticed while trying to copy something was, that functionality was disabled, I also noticed a share this on Facebook button which is why I un-installed foxit faster than you can say: “Beardless dial-up” – don’t ask, but it’s now possible to browse the net with out a beard! RMS, you can shave it now.

So on to the copy thing. Roelf pointed out a nifty little reader called Sumatrapdf (http://code.google.com/p/sumatrapdf/), it’s open source so it’s perfect. Try the copy thing again and ”Copying text was denied (copying as image only)”, I can’t paste images into Skype chats very easily, no non-bearded internet for me :(

But wait, let’s look at the source:

pdf_has_permission(pdf_xref *xref, int p)
{
if (!xref->crypt)
return 1;
return xref->crypt->p & p;
}

That’s the stupid bastard that is ruining the fun. So I got to installing VC++ to hack away the annoyance, in the meantime Roelf fired up IDA and edited the DLL, with “big having success” as they would say in China. A few thousand seconds later VC++ was installed so I decided to correct the “broken code” and fix the other glaring issue the Sumatra team seems to have missed, WHICH IS THE BRIGHT YELLOW. 

 

So here is a non yellow, PDF stupidity free version of Sumatra (2.0) for your consumption.

Sumatra Installer – 4.5mb – SumatraSane_Installer_2.0.exe
Sumatra Standalone Zip – 2.4mb – SumatraSane-2.0.zip 

I have not gone ahead and uploaded the code or sent it to the developers as it is a small change and I think if they wanted it to work this way, it would.