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Best Free Non-Adobe PDF Reader
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In a Hurry?
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 Go straight to the Quick Selection Guide |
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Introduction
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| Sick to death of Adobe's slow, bloated PDF Reader? If so, then consider one of the excellent free third party viewers that are available. |
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Discussion
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It allows PDF annotation and thankfully leaves the annotated copy free of validation marks. It also allows you to fill and save Adobe PDF forms, extract text and images, magnify text and export PDF pages or documents to BMP, JPEG, TIFF, PNG formats and has excellent image/text clarity. The only downside is the program size with a download size of 13 MB and an installed folder size of 45MB. However, there is a portable version available that is only 6.18MB. The latest version will even open secure documents I was previously only able to open with Adobe
It's small, loads in a flash, supports bookmarks, has search capability, offers many extra features and even allows you to annotate PDF files. On top of that, it can also print PDFs. On the downside, I find the PDFs look less clear on my PC screen than with PDF-XChange. One thing of which you might want to be careful of, is that during the installation, if you un-check or check to install the Firefox plugin, the start menu shortcut, desktop shortcut, and quick launch shortcut boxes are automatically checked. I found editing the fonts and other properties of comments and annotations to be much easier and more intuitive with Foxit than with PDF-Xchange Viewer. One frustration is that when selecting some features I received an error message "Missing Component Found" and though it offered to connect to the site and download the component, I have yet to successfully download and install any missing components this way. We have been advised via this link here that the latest version of Foxit includes potentially unwanted items which will install unless you read the instructions carefully and choose not to accept them. The msi download does not contain these potentially unwanted items at this time (I have installed the msi version and verified this myself. grf, Site Moderator, 01/July/2010).
It can view, print, and convert PDF files to TXT, BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, WMF, EMF, EPS, and the Standard installer is only a 896KB download! What I didn't like about Cool PDF Reader is that I got a few error messages while trying to open some of my PDF files, but some worked fine. Also, with some files I had a problem with text readability as words got squashed on top of each other. Another thing that bothered me is that page contents do not get updated while the scroll bar is dragged, and loading pages can sometimes get glitchy. All in all, this is a slim reader that uses few resources.
The download size weighs in at a whopping 22 MB. If the size doesn't scare you off, Perfect PDF Reader has some unique features worth looking at.
The interface is a little crude and no, it hasn't got the features or image clarity of PDF-XChange; but 99.9% of the time, all most folks want from a PDF reader is to be able to read PDFs. And that's what Sumatra does. |
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Related Products and Links
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Last Update: 27 Sep, 2011
Last Update: 24 March, 2011
Portable version: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/foxit_reader_portable
Last Update: 1 April, 2008
Last Update: 19 July, 2009
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Editor
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This category is maintained by volunteer editor Desi. Registered members can contact the editor with any comments or suggestions they might have by clicking here. |
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Tags
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best free pdf reader, top free pdf reader, read pdf files, pdf viewer, best free pdf viewer, top free pdf viewer, annotate pdf, add comments to pdf |
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Comments
I found a new pdf reader called "Soda 3D PDF Reader"
It has a 3D view in reading pdf files.
website can be found here:
http://sodapdf.com/free-pdf-reader/download.aspx
Users may wish to consider using a disposable email address which is necessary to obtain the features unlock key.
“OCR functionality added to the FREE PDF-XChange Viewer!” I'm happy with this news!
My copy of PDF X-Change PDF Viewer now has a great big red watermark across each document I read stating that it's a demo version. Very annoying. I think maybe the review should be updated since the "free" version isn't very useable any more :-(
You should send your question to support@tracker-software.com. This isn’t ordinary problem. I use free version (2.5.199) and it works excellent and stably.
Thanks I just installed the latest version and the red watermark has disappeared (should have checked this before complaining!).
YO x')
Why you did not Nitro PDF Reader ? It fits very well with Firefox and IE !
A little update section.. ^.^
Otherwise, excellent site, thank you very much ^_-
PS : Sorry for my english, i use Google Translate, i'm french x'D
A really lightweight PDF reader(10% size of Adobe Reader):
SlimPDF http://www.investintech.com/resources/freetools/slimpdfreader/
Hi
First of all thank you for this review, I prefer PDF-Xchange but I got two problems with it, first: loading files is slow, second: I don’t know how to extract the images from a file, the (selected graphics) always non active and I don’t know how to activate it. Thank you Gizmo’s
You should choose Snapshot Tool (and select graphic in the file) and then File-Export-Export to Image-Selected Graphic
But this will not be extra benefit, because snapshot tool already does the job by making a copy of the image and I can paste and edit it in any image editor, what if I want to extract all the images of the document?
You may do it with PDF-XChange Tools. Information about this product is in tracker-software-site.
thank you very much for your help
You might want to update your Foxit Selection Guide. They also have a portable version now:
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/foxit_reader_portable
Haven't tried it yet, but am planning to.
Well, forget about it. Either there's something wrong with my system or this portable version has a bug.
When I try to set it to be the default PDF reader, it comes up at every single launch time with the question, Foxit is not the default reader, do I wish to set it. This will enable double-clicking. Of course I answer yes, but the next time I start it, the same dialog comes up. And the pdf files therefore are not clickable.
There also doesn't seem to be a way to make the toolbar stick.
Very disappointing.
foxit now integrates with facebook and twitter. why a pdf reader would need this integration, i don't know.
Haven't you heard? Humans will soon be offered this integration at birth! :D
Did the person who reviewed PDF X-Change bother trying to load image-based PDFs with it? I doubt it because there's no way staring at a blank page as it's loaded one quarter section at a time for 10 seconds is 4.5/5 star quality software. I encounter this with electronic textbooks in PDF format for two of my college courses, and it's very annoying and unproductive. I'm going to try Sumatra.
Stay away from Foxit reader - it installs an annoying "Ask.com" toolbar in your browser, even if you uncheck the box during the install. You can't even uninstall the frikkin' ask toolbar later because the uninstaller is broken.
I usually use Sumatra PDF Viewer. The main feature that sumatra has (and other PDF-viewer don't) is that it does not lock the file while it opens it. (and therefore, you cannot write or save the file afterwards, Sumatra does not have a save option.)
This feature comes in handy when you're typesetting a document (for example in LaTex ) and compile it to get PDF output. using sumatra you can view the output simultaneously without closing and re-opening the pdf file.
I liked PDF-Xchange for a long time but they changed their default search toolbar and shortcut key to web searching. I can never remember the new shortcut key to search within the document and have to look it up.
I assume this is for advertising revenue but it annoyed me enough to switch to Foxit. Glad I did because it's faster too. Quite happy with it.
I also can't believe Adobe hasn't learned their lesson and changed their bully ways now that so many are jumping ship. They still install all kinds of unnecessary plugins and start-up items without your permission!
I have both on my PC and have checked: Сtrl+Shift+F on Foxit and PDF-XChange. But... PDF-XChange has larger possibilities for searching in the web. I can search not only in Ask.com but also in Wikipedia, Yahoo, .... and add my prefer search provides. I didn't know about it and never used ... but thank you.
In my copy of Foxit it is ctrl+F or just place your cursor in the find toolbar that's already showing. Ctrl+shift+F gave me an error (as it should.)
Weird.
Also if I want to search for a word in any other search engine, I just type the word in my url bar. Don't need the extra help from Pdf-xchange.
after swithing over to PDF-X-change from adobe was great cuz of the features... butttt the slow loading of PDF-X is a major let down.
Of late PDF-X viewer has started wobbling on screen... like a blinking blob it's become..gonna try some new pdf reader...
any suggestions which pdf reader to go for... my basic necessity is i should be able to edit or mark on my pdf files
If you have a problem with any PDF file loading slowly in the PDF-XChange Viewer - send us a sample and we will work on it diligently to ensure its resolved !
You should not experience any such issue and if you do we want to know and fix it - please use the option 'Report A Problem' under help - or send to support@tracker-software.com.
Also in Version 3 - now in Alpha testing at our development offices we are working on general speed improvements overall - so any such files would prove invaluable.
Thanks
A personally like Nitro PDF Reader , have never had any problems with it
available here
http://nitroreader.com/
Nitro was good...once. Doesn't integrate into Firefox at all for me anymore, So can't recommend.
It seems to integrate fine for me. The Nitro PDF interface in Firefox is crude but that will be improved in latter iterations.
It seems nobody noticed that PDF-Xchange Viewer loads images a lot slower, in its latest portable incarnations. I used to love that progie, but imagine my consternation when I saw the Adobe crapware on my new laptop loading image based pdfs ten times faster than PDFX! It's not fun anymore, staring 3 seconds at a blank page till PDFX finds fit to show a graph to my clients. Sic transit gloria mundi, tracker...
SumatraPDF is the best I think. Haven't try it with more PDFs though, but it's very light(just about 1MB); and there's even a portable version over at portableapps.com.
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