PDF’s are heavily used as the document reader of choice for several purposes today whether it’s for personal use like CV’s or commercially, like in the case of eBooks. Adobe Reader has long been the PDF reader of choice as it is developed by the creators of the PDF format itself however Adobe Reader has its downside. It sucks in the memory department consuming a lot of CPU resources and it also takes quite a bit of disk space.
In recent times, several better alternatives have showed up, here are 5 of them:
Foxit is pretty much the most popular alternative to Adobe Reader and the reason i quite obvious. It fixes the memory issue, it consumes very little memory and it is only 5MB in size. Also, the application is highly portable and can be easily accessed via a USB drive.
Sumatra is also quickly gaining popularity, it is open source and very light on memory, it is also a single standalone file so it is portable as well. Sumatra is great if your main purpose for PDF’s is read only. For more features, the former is a better alternative as it is more feature filled, however since it is only around 1MB having it around somewhere in your portable or main storage will be hardly noticeable.
PDF-Xchange Viewer is also another great alternative to Adobe. While it’s a heavier application (much like Adobe Reader) than the aforementioned software it has a multiude of features in comparison and consumes less memory than Adobe.
Cool PDF Reader is less than 1MB in size and it is meant to just read PDF’s and that’s about it, it allows basic functionality like zooming in and out.
Perfect PDF Reader will probably be very tasteful to the Office 2007 user, the interface is strikingly similar and the reader offers all functions for reading PDF’s, it addition it allows exporting pages as images among a few other features.
There are quite a few other alternatives available online that perform pretty much the same functions as the applications included above, there are some situations where you might need to use the pioneer Adobe Reader but in most cases one of the above alternatives should do the trick.
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Accessing it through a USB drive!, that is really useful feature. Good info
.-= Knowswhy´s last blog ..Why do Zebras have stripes? =-.
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Sometime back before my laptop crashed, I made the decision to remove Adobe and stick with Foxit cos it was lighter and loaded faster than the former.
At the moment I still have both of them just should in case I run into a file one of them can’t surprisingly handle.
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