FoxIt Reader is annoying me... Best alternative PDF reader?

I love FoxIt Reader, but the ad to upgrade to FoxIt Pro now changes color every 10 secs or so and that's just too annoying for me.

What's the best PDF reader that's not FoxIt?

 

You can disable the ad. Click View.

 

Oh wow, perfect! Thank you very much.

(I feel so stupid now...)

FoxIt rocks again!!!

 

Foxit crashes when i try to change printing properties .

why?

 

Foxit is awesome. I don't think you would ever find a better alternative. I never noticed the Foxit Pro thing changing color.

 

However, I noticed it appears to turn itself on again once you close and open Foxit.

 

Yes... it does.

It can be disabled by keyboard by pressing Alt-V and then A. So I will need to write a little script....

 

You can also try Acrobat Reader Lite. This has all the unnecessary stuff removed.

 

No thanks. I'm so fed up with Adobe, I'm not going to use any of their products any more than I really have to. Here's why:
- Adobe Reader is insanely slow and bloated beyond belief.
- Adobe Flash caused me browser crashes in both Firefox and IE until I figured out how to stop it (configure it to turn off hardware acceleration)
- Adobe doesn't make 64-bit versions of any of their major products, which is the main thing holding me back from using a 64-bit web browser (since you can hardly use the web without Flash anymore). I mean, it shouldn't take much more than running their compiler again with different options... right?
- The Linux version of Flash is way behind... they don't really keep it up to date.
- The reason Windows Vista doesn't have built-in support for PDF is that Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft if they added it.

 

Keep us posted.

 

I think there is a program called PDF Exchange. It is lightweight but I don't use it anymore. I use Aerobat Pro now since I ended up buying the full version.

 

It's likely most of the free programs have some kind of annoying notice, or ad trying to get you to upgrade.

 

another is sumatra pdf: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/

 

Wow, I never even noticed that little ad in Foxit Reader, albeit I don't have PDFs opened for a very long time. I have the misfortune of having to use Adobe at work since I need to create PDFs from time to time. I hate it so much, it is just such a piece of crap software.

 

ok, I tried PDF-Xchange and Sumatra. I'll compare them here with FoxIt, based on the features I use and care about. If you care about different things than I do, then the best program may be different for you.

FoxIt:
+ Fastest scrolling of the bunch. (Or rather, fastest at rendering the pages when scrolling.)
+ Nicest-looking IMO... large icons with clear meaning
+ Can turn off advertisement in the View menu.
+ Supports tabs.
- Advertisement for pay version which changes color, which I find distracting
- No thumbnail-based page navigation bar (that I could find).

PDF-Xchange Viewer:
+ Thumbnail-based page navigation bar (which you can turn on or off)
+ Will install a 32- or 64-bit executable, depending on your system. (The other two programs are just 32-bit binaries)
+ Suports tabs.
+ Seems to have the most preferences/settings to tweak. Seems to remember my view settings the best too.
- Shows you all the features you're not getting because you don't have the Pro version. (You can turn off some of the extra toolbars, but they're still in the menus.)
- Shows advertisement for Pro version. However, the ad is static, so less annoying than FoxIt's ad IMO.
- No option to turn off advertisement.
- Slower page rendering than FoxIt when scrolling.
- Slightly blurrier text/font rendering than the other two (IMO). (Although this is probably a matter of personal preference.)
- Uses the most memory of the three, by a large margin (at least with my test document... 120 MB vs. 55-60 MB for the other two with a 268-page PDF).

SumatraPDF:
+ Does less, and is proud of it. Simple and neat.
+ No advertisement!
- I don't like the default view settings in this program, and it doesn't apply my view settings to new documents. It'll remember them for the same file, but when I open a new file, it goes back to using its default settings... which I don't like. (But if you like its defaults then it may not be as much of an issue.) I don't think the other programs will apply my view settings to new documents either (at least not FoxIt)... but I like their defaults better.
- No page navigation bar like PDF-Xchange has.
- No arbitrary zoom levels. (i.e. you can do 125% or 150%, but not anything in between. The other two programs allow arbitrary zoom levels.)
- Page rendering speed when scrolling is slower than FoxIt and similar to PDF-Xchange. But it displays "Please wait... rendering" while it's rendering, which I find slightly annoying. (PDF-Xchange shows a blank page until it's rendered, which I prefer.)

So... they're all good programs, and they all load quickly on my machine. They each have their strong points. Sumatra is simple and ad-free. PDF-Xchange is 64-bit and has that cool page navigation bar. But my overall favorite of the three is FoxIt. Maybe partly because it's what I'm used to? I don't know... It has what I need, I like the UI and icons, I like its font rendering, it scrolls the quickest.

Well... that was much longer than I expected. I'll post my FoxIt ad-disabling script here later tonight or tomorrow.

 

Great comparisons, swarmer. Very helpful.

They still haven't fixed that viewing "glitch" for Sumatra yet? I had another member tell me otherwise.

That was basically what killed it for me. Good, light, no-nonsense reader, but that default window size was annoying.

 

to save your viewing preferences, set them when no documents are open. then they should apply to all documents.

i don't like how i can't control where the preferences file gets created (or that there is even a preference file). of course, the default window size is also annoying, especially on my 1280x800 screen.

 

Wow... thanks! That worked. That makes Sumatra a real contender for me.