Solid .PDF Alternatives to Adobe
April 22nd, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 11 CommentsTweet This
Recently, I became annoyed enough with constant prompts for software updates and pop-up messages from Adobe that I decided to try alternatives to Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader. (I swear, they must know how annoyed people get with the constant nagging for software updates.) It turns out that there are some excellent alternatives, and if you deal with .PDF content a lot, they can save you time, hassle and disk space.
For Windows users, Foxit Reader is a completely free, useful utility for viewing .PDF files. It has a very small footprint, taking up only 2MB of disk space–about one-tenth what Adobe Reader takes. Best of all, you can perform many functions that you would typically turn to the expensive verson of Adobe Acrobat for, including editing text in .PDFs, annotating files, and saving completed .PDF forms.
In addition to taking up much less disk space than Adobe’s offerings, Foxit Reader just feels fast. It loads faster, and I get work done faster in it.
Preview, Mac OS X’s .PDF utility, is actually pretty good, but there are other tools for Mac users who want to extend what they do with .PDFs. Judi Sohn did a post on PDFPen which is a good way for Mac OS X users to extend what they do with .PDFs. It costs $50, but you can merge pages together from multiple .PDFs, cut .PDFs, sign electronic .PDF documents, repurpose .PDF content, and more. Check out PDFPen’s matrix comparing its features to Adobe Acrobat.
Do you know of any good Adobe alternatives?
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OS X Preview can also be used to merge pages from multiple PDF documents, cut .PDFs and more. All through the power of Automator, which ships with OS X and is very easy to use.
Eventually, I’m going to get around to putting up a screencast of how to do this sort of stuff at my blog … but for the time being, just open up Automator (in your Applications folder) and take a look at the PDFs actions. Some good ones are: Combine Pages, and Compress Images in PDF Documents.
I have been using Foxit Reader for at least three years, keeping up on every upgrade. I recommend it to everyone. It’s one of those “keep it simple” utilities that win you over the first time you use it. Great pick.
I would also suggest PDFescape:
http://www.pdfescape.com
Free, it can view, edit, and such PDF documents online (without downloading or installing anything).
I tried this a few months ago… Unfortunately it didn’t work well with PDF form fields which I use frequently in my biz.
Here is an article with step-by-step video on Adobe Acrobat Alternatives that covers Reading, Creating, and Editing pdf files with free software.
I moved to FoxIt about an year ago because of an update to Acrobat Reader which broke stuff.
Though there were a couple of issues initially, I haven’t looked back since.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
When I upgraded a system earlier this year from XP Home to XP Pro I had to reinstall Acrobat Pro 7.0 upgrade, which replaced an earlier Acrobat Pro. Although the upgrade on XP Home went smoothly, the XP Pro reinstall required finding an older Acrobat Pro version to install prior to installing the 7.0 upgrade. Then the bad news: the Distiller and PDF printer would not install due to a “too small” data portal. Adobe’s solution for me was to try 15 different operations which required about 20 hours of service downtime with all the required stops and reboots. When none of that worked their solution was for me to buy their latest without the upgrade. My solution was to try Foxit and some others, including using the PDF doc export feature in OpenOffice, Google Docs & IBM’s Symphony BETA. For diskspace of a Reader, the free Lupo Pen Suite provided both the 1.6M Foxit Reader and 1M SumatraPDF along with a bunch of other powerful free programs.
The free CutePDF Writer also replaces what Adobe wouldn’t fix for me. I hope Adobe gets the message soon about retaining current customers. I’ve been a customer since 1995.
skim for OSX
I’ve been using Nitro PDF and have been very happy with it – it’s $99 but it’s worth it since I read and annotate a lot of eBooks. I ended up looking for an Acrobat alternative because I also got so sick of the nagging – and there was a whole host of license registration issues (I was using Acrobat, not just Reader).
Go lee!! ;) Admittedly I’m a bit biased as I work for Nitro PDF, but we’ve got a great product at an awesome price and new features being added all the time, I’ll always recommend Foxit if someone just needs a viewer but for the more powerful features (without shelling out for Acrobat) then Nitro is #1 :)