Discussion on:

Five lightweight and free PDF viewers

Are you and your organization still using Adobe Reader? Or have you adopted a different PDF viewer?

I use Foxit at home, but at work we have some people who are against it so we use Adobe Reader at work.

I don't know if this is available for Windows (but a number of Qt applications are being ported), but what about Okular?

I used to use Foxit as a replacement of Adobe Reader however I have dropped it as it wants to install a bunch of other junk (various toolbars and the like). Adobe Reader is still bloated however they have improved the update process. On Windows I still just default to Adobe.

Although it has begun to seem as bloated as Acrobat...

I've been using this to manage and fill in PDFs for some time, and it just got upgraded ...

Very quick, more importantly, very safe -

Try it and let me know that you think! No - this is -NOT- a paid endorsement.

I prefer Nitro Reader to all the others. It is full-featured and not bloated.

I have been using PDF-Xchange viewer for awhile - lightweight and lots of good features. Changed from Fox-it when it started to get bloated.

I have had problems with several web sites not giving me usable access to PDFs when I had Fox-It installed on my Win7 PC. The sites "insisted" on having Acrobat available before allowing me to read the files. Anyone else encounter this?

Except for this problem, I much prefer Fox-It over Acrobat.

I got the same thing from some sites when trying to download tech specs and brochures from prospective suppliers. The solution: Simply switch to another browser. The problem for me only affected the foxit plugin on IE7/IE8. FireFox and Chrome both gave up the goodies.

I also prefer Nitro. The only thing I dont like about it is the Office-like Ribbon on top.

While it is large, I guess it works well. This needs pointing out in the article, I think. I say guess because I don't use it, but depend on Acrobat Standard which I use several times per day for editing, anotating, deleting pages, rotating, reducing file size, scanning to, printing and reading pdfs. While it is ridiculously expensive, I would hate to be without it. And I have used a number of lower cost paid alternatives (Cute, Foxit) and free versions (995). I still pay the money for Acrobat upgrades when my version stops working on a new operating system every 5 years or so.

...for Android? I do most of my reading on my tablets these days and rarely open a PDF on my home laptop or desktop and only occasionally on the work desktop. The Adobe PDF reader has all sorts of performance issues (with graphics heavy PDFs in particular) on the Android platform, too.

I have two alternatives installed but neither render PDFs consistently (Perfect Viewer and the PDF reader in Polaris suite). In fact, one of them usually turns the readout to 'negative' whenever it sees text across an image and won't render the rest of the document properly after that!

Anyone got experience of PDF reading on Android and have a favourite?

By the way, I've felt for some time now that the PDF format isn't really a PDF format any more. File sizes seem bloated (not just the reader software) and the performance of some files is poor whatever reader you try. I really wish someone would pay more attention to the 'portable' in 'Portable Document Format' - or am I just being silly?

You can install Adobe Reader! Probably still bloatware by Android standards but at least you know it'll render consistently.

For desktop, I heard a rumour that Firefox (or was it Chrome, I forget??) were planning a built-in PDF reader for viewing documents on the web. Can see why - I use Adobe Reader on Ubuntu and it's not the most stable. I'd use another reader but (a) some sites don't play nicely (see above) and (b) they don't open the PDF inside another tab

To use Firefox' PDF reader (Which is still in beta, but works well), you must go into about:config and search for pdf.js then you can enable it, I don't remember exactly how I did it but it is self explanatory. Then you must also make sure you don't have another PDF reader that is automatically opening your pdfs in Firefox.

I've associated pdf files to Chrome. It's far from perfect but it does mean one less piece of software to install. I'm using the canary build of Chrome which means more updates (including to the pdf viewer) but it's less stable.

In my organization we still use Adobe Reader (currently v. 10.1.4) on Windows. It is somewhat slow but has the best printing options: you can scale printed pages, make posters and booklets, it recognizes the markups in PDFs for press and can remove them while printing. Also with AR you can add comments, verify signed documents and digitally sign documents enabled for signing.

But in my experience Adobe Reader has problems printing certain PDFs (scanned or with heavy graphics) with some printer drivers. In such occasions we have to use another PDF reader. I find Foxit Reader quite good but it wants to install junk software with it.

On Ubuntu I use Evince which is fine.

A feature that PDF readers generally lack is the ability to delete pages from a PDF file and to add/insert pages from another PDF file. IMHO, this is not complicated to implement and there are free tools that can do it (e.g. I use pdftk command line tool which is available for multiple OS').

Several people say they still use Adobe for the printing options. I use Nitro or Foxit precisely because Adobe so often produces gobbledegook when printing. Something to do with embedded fonts. I don't really care as Foxit does the job so much better anyway.

Okular is the PDF reader of KDE desktop environment, available both for Windows and Linux. It uses the same backend than Evince (Poppler). The best features:
1) uncheck "follow DRM restriction" in the config and you can print restricted documents!
2) annotations can be saved in the document or in your personal folder: you can annotate a document without modifying it; it is more secure if you have to forward some documents to third parties; and several people can have their own annotations on the same shared document.

PDFXChange viewer has a free version - also well worth a look. not sure about the footprint, but features are good : full markup tools, export excerpts to image (with control of dpi). non-invasive software. windows only, sorry Jack

JG, thanks for the inbuilt firefox reader tip!

Be nice if this article was available as a PDF too......

What about NitroPDF?

I personally use PDFLite. It's a simple, no-nonsense PDF reader, editor and viewer. It opens all files and convert them to a PDF format. The same goes for converting PDF's to other file types like Word.
I downloaded it here - http://www.pdflite.com/

I had gotten a little bored with foxit reader and thought i'd see what was out there. tried nuance. clumsy installer (33MB versus 1.5 for foxit). required submission of email to download and *again* to "register" without which installer would not complete. okay, i think, let's see the software. hideous interface. *gigantic* ads. i could not uninstall it fast enough. foxit reader has none of these problems. i'm sorry i doubted you foxit reader. moral of this story: if it ain't broke don't fix it!!!!