Best Free Non-Adobe PDF Reader

Guess these ones should get a look at and review:

SReader (portable!) http://www.soraxsoft.com/pdf-sdk.html?0

Altarsoft Reader http://www[dot]altarsoft[dot]com/altarsoft_pdf_reader.shtml

Regards,

Brazil

Moderator: Link to altarsoft obfuscated as site gets yellow (medium risk) rating from Web of Trust (WOT).

I Dl'd PDFill and couldn't get it to view a pdf. Tried STDU and had no problem at all. Seems fine to me so that's what I'll use for now. Thx for all the input folks.

As far as I could tell, PDF-XChange Viewer doesn't have an option to allow continuous scrolling in full-screen mode. A shame, since scrolling down then all of a sudden the page flashing to the next is really irritating. I'm going to try the other ones listed here.

My favorite pdf viewer is STDU Viewer.

PROS: It is very flexible, light on resources and lightning fast - I can typically open a new document, customize settings and be on page 2 while Adobe and PDF X-change viewer are still struggling to open the file! It is a well-written, small program (download is only 1.6 MB) and runs just as well on my netbook as my desktop, with no compatability issues and no difficulty in opening different PDF versions. It is also very customizable and easy to use - features include bookmarks, thumbnails, tabbed document menu (like firefox), zoom, cut and paste, search, page rotation (of all pages OR selected pages), plus customizable menus, navigation panes, navigation commands, display size and display area (you can even customize how many clicks to turn a page and in what area!). And the display is excellent - fonts and images are clear and sharp (even when you blow fonts up to ridiculous proportions) - and if you have a poor scanned original, you can adjust display properties in STDU Viewer to compensate (for example, in a pdf image file you can increase gamma to darken text which appears too light). Lastly, STDU Viewer also automatically remembers where you left off reading and ALL the document view settings applied to a particular document (unless you configure it not to, a feature which is also customizable!) All this and it is an excellent text, djvu and comic book file reader in addition to pdf. Oh, and it will convert pdf and djvu to text or images, and can also convert djvu and tiff to pdf.

CONS: Documentation is non-existant, but the program is so intuitive and easy to use that it hardly matters. The real negatives is that this program doesn't do text reflow, annotations and highlighting - sadness. If STDU Viewer had those features, plus better browser integration, I'd be able to delete Adobe and PDF X-Change Viewer off my hard drive, which would make me very happy as I'm not that fond of either program - Adobe is an intrusive resource pig and a prime example of bloatware and X-Change viewer is a somewhat buggy resource pig - and both are way too s-l-o-w.

But for now, I keep all 3 on my hard drive - STDU Viewer is my default for pdf, used 95% of the time - I only use X-Change Viewer for annotations and Adobe when I have a document I want to reflow (Adobe will do one page reflow of some documents - I would love a pdf viewer that did 2-page book layout reflow so I could blow up the fonts to avoid eyestrain, but still wrap the text to keep the display within the frame of my netbook screen for easy reading and one click navigation! Maybe someday.).

Hey y'all..! Recently I have this gargantuan 320 Mb .pdf file and found out that it always crashes when the memory required to read it reaches 2.2 GB (I have 3 GB DDR2 RAM). Thought first that upgrading the RAM might me the solution, but that too is a vain effort. Does this have something to do with the .pdf reader (I'm using Adobe's)? Anyone knows what software to open that huge file?
Great thanks!

Adobe taking its time to patch their recent vulnerability, even though it's being actively exploited! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/04/adobe_reader_attack/

How about Altarsoft PDF Reader http://download.cnet.com/Altarsoft-PDF-Reader/3000-10743_4-10962249.html... ? It's as good as Foxit and maybe better because it lets you read PDF files like reading a book, going from one page to the next and back instead of having to scroll down, and it's a much smaller download, only 1 MB.

Some free versions of PDF readers offer some functions but at a cost of watermark, or they just do not allow to save modified document. There is a way arround.

Instead of saving a document you should print it. But you print it on PDF virtual printer (PDFCreator, Bullzip PDF Printer, CutePDF...). Now you have free program with capabilities of commercial version.

In spite of misleading bold headers on Foxit's website, when you wade through all the details, you find that the free version of the Foxit Reader does not allow annotation. Or have I no skills in the English language?

I am an average, general, user using windows 7 enterprise 64 bit and want to try PDF Xchange Viewer. You have recommended this link for the download:
http://www.docu-track.com/home/prod_user/PDF-XChange_Tools/pdfx_viewer

However, after much work I have finally found a 64bit version of PDF Xchange at this link:
http://www.docu-track.com/downloads/users/

But the 64 bit version is an MSI installer version and the page says "The easiest answer to this is if you are not sure - do not use these installers - they are aimed at corporate system administrators - not general users, so if you are not sure - use the default installer provided and not the MSI installer option !!!"

So my question is...as an average user with a 64bit system which version do a install, the 32 bit that you recommend or the 64 bit free version with MSl?

Thank you for any help you can provide.

Hey,

mr. moderator, i think you should also consider language support by pdf readers. some of these pdfs read european languages well, but most of them cannot open asian language documents. foxit, for example, cannot open a pdf document files of chinese character names. you'll have to change it to english alphabet to do so. (i am using the latest version of foxit, still the same problem straight from the developers).

well done people. good job mr. moderator.

cheers y'all.

SupportAlert used to recommend the free eXPert PDF Reader by Visagesoft
www.visagesoft.com/products/pdfreader

Why is it no longer on th list? I find it very good and with a much smaller memory footprint than Foxit.

What about STDU Viewer?
STDU Viewer is a document viewer for multiple file formats.

http://www.stdutility.com/stduviewer.html

TXT, TIFF, PDF, DjVu, CBR, CBZ, XPS

I think Foxit also has its official portable version.
Why is it not mentioned here?

I recently downloaded PDF xchange viewer to my laptop, and I just love it. It was quite a breath of fresh air after adobe 8 and the best thing is I can read a document just after I click on it to open. Adobe really slowed down my computer and gave me stomach ulcers.

However I need to get printouts of the docs on my laptop and the computer at my work place has only adobe reader. It does not open the files saved using PDF XChange. (I get an error message) I need to do this since I am using my work place computer to get my printouts. This is really frustrating and I am wondering whether to go back to Adobe reader on my laptop. I tried the PDF Xchange site and nothing turns up on the search. SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME, since Adobe has found a way to screw me and give me stomach ulcers again!

I've found Foxit to be extremely slow to print.

After trying Cool PDF and Sumatra PDF and finding that both failed to open many files, I then downloaded Foxit Reader and found that it opened everyhting, and that it is FAR superior to Adobe Reader, even though Foxit is only 12 MB to Adobe's 26 MB.

I tried Cool PDF just now and there some pdf files it won't open. Not so cool after all.

After trying all the recommended PDF readers I found PDF-XChange Viewer to be superior. It can open many PDF's that can't be opened by Foxit or Adobe readers. Moreover the clarity in rendering is superior. And finally you have so many features.

Does anyone know the solution to this PDF-XChange Viewer problem?

I can't open files with PDF-XChange Viewer from a browser--neither in Firefox nor in IE.

PDF-XChange Viewer opens the files perfeclty from my HD (when the website lets me save them directly), but the browser plugins seem to fail: in Firefox, all I get is a window that's blank except for a PDFXVwer logo; in IE, I get a window that seems to be counting up the file's size and then ends with the spurious message "Document is broken".

When I installed PDF-XChange Viewer, I chose a full install including the addins for both browsers, and both browsers show the PDF-XChange Viewer plugin to be enabled. I also have PDF-XChange Viewer as the default program for PDF files. I re-installed PDF-XChange Viewer, but the problem persists. I'm using a fully up-to-date Windows XP Home.

Thanks,
-Rich

Thanks for the work here, this is a great resource.

One suggestion: it might be interesting to collect and make available a few "benchmark" pdf files that will flush out compatibility & performance issues.

It would help differentiate some of the small, fast, low-feature variety to know that "viewer A read all the reference PDFs without problem" or "viewer B choked on reference #2", etc.

Personally, I used to be a big fan of Foxit, but now with the new automatic update features I'm less than thrilled (yeah, I know it can be turned off, but it starts to remind me of when I stopped liking Acrobat reader).

I'm trying PDF-XChange at your suggestion and so far it looks great.

I cannot figure out why none of them have decent bookmarking capability. I just want to be able to open a pdf, read however long, and bookmark where I leave off. I know you can sort of do it with foxit comments, comment a page then search for comments... but that's a clumsy way to do it. I want a bookmarks menu like in any other e-book reader, browser, etc.

Evince is a light weight but good free pdf reader.

Tried out PDF-XChange Viewer and Cool PDF Reader and have gone back to Adobe Reader (v5, a version from a few years back - the newer versions of it, esp 7+ are particularly bloaty).

PDF-XChange was significantly slower than Adobe Reader 5 and the download included an unexplained other .exe

Cool PDF Reader seemed horrible. Incredibly slow to open, sometimes didn't even visibly open, but was just there hogging 99% of resources as revealed by the Windows Task Manager Processers viewer (Ctrl-Alt-Del). Was installed after PDF-XChange so who knows if one was affecting the other.

Did not even try Foxit Reader Free as it was not clear from their page if this was available. There was something written on the download page about needing to email them in order to get browser-adware-free version. Well, that ain't happening.

Conclusion: yuk, yuk and yuk

Review doesn't say how well (or if at all) the products work in the major browsers. For me, a major need for reading PDFs is when I encounter them on the Web.