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Software Saturday: Foxit Reader

Using Adobe Reader has been the traditional method of viewing PDFs, can’t blame them since they are after all the main folks behind the PDF revolution.

However, one complain that everyone has had wrt Adobe Reader has been its massive load time. I will admit that the latest version, 8, does load extremely quickly. But the download is well more than 20MB.

Hence, it has been time to look for a lighter alternative. And in walks Foxit Reader 2.0.

Foxit Reader 2.0 is a free PDF document viewer and printer. The download is a little over 1.5MB, which means you’re going to be ready to read PDFs in one tenth of the time!

Foxit Reader

Besides its small download size, Foxit Reader definitely launchs extremely fast. It also has most if not all the features of the traditional Acrobat Reader.

Foxit Reader 2.0 supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.6.

And best of all the software has a fantastic price tag; FREE! 🙂

Unfortunately, free also means you can’t do somethings you would have hoped for. If you are willing to shell out $39.00, you can gain some additional features via the Foxit Reader Pro Pack. These include the ability to save annotations in the PDF and converting the PDF to a TXT files. I can live without these two 😉

Another $35 will get you a PDF Creator, which lets you create you’re own PDF files, while another $99 gets you a PDF Editor. Both these are still cheaper than Adobe Acrobat. I haven’t given either a test, because I still believe that Open Source programs can serve me well.

Talking about Open Source, I’ll share with you one such software next week. Until then, do give Foxit Reader a shot and let me know your findings. Are you doing to use this to view your PDFs or will the traditional Adobe Reader serve you?

4 Comments

  1. Go on Sourceforge and one may get many pdf utilities, from pdf reader to pdf creators. They all work fine. Ajay, I dont get one thing then, why on earth does adobe charges us to get that pretty large software. And as of just reading, their demo versions fine and I dont think it takes much time to upload, then why rely on these free unsupported sftwares.
    If I am missing some thing then mention it.

  2. Kartik the primary reason would be the download size.

    Adobe Reader works well with me. Upto 7 you had major loading issues, though like I mentioned 8 is much faster.

    Adobe charges us to make money 😉

    Didn’t understand the \”comment moderations $U]\”?

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