Adobe Reader is the standard application for viewing PDFs. Indeed PDF as a format is an Adobe creation. However, Adobe Reader is a big application for what it does. Its also uses a lot of memory, over 20MB for a one page document. Along with the extremely slow startup, there are lots of extensions and complicated features. There are alternatives however, it doesn't  take a supercomputer to read PDFs.

 Sumatra PDF can be found here.

Foxit PDF Reader, another free reader, is the most well known rival to Adobe Reader. The memory usage is a lot lower than Adobe Reader, coming in at about 15MB with the same document. It also opens up a lot faster. However, it isn't open source and it tries to flog their paid for pro version every time you use it. Another downside of all non-Adobe Reader is that they will not open automatically within a web page in Internet Explorer or Firefox, the PDF has to be downloaded and opened in a new window.

I have recently found a much better and lighter reader, Sumatra PDF. Additional appeal to me is the fact that it's open source. Sumatra PDF is a minimalistic application, with very few buttons, only: open, back, forward, zoom in, and zoom out. There are also options to change the view (zoom, page layout etc.) in the toolbar. Reading the same document as the other two, Sumatra uses only 7MB of memory, and opens almost instantaneously.

The Sumatra PDF installation file is 940KB as of version 0.6, comparing that to Foxit's 1.67MB, and Adobe Reader's massive 20MB. The application takes up 895KB of space once its installed with only one .exe and an uninstaller (37KB). No registry entries are added, so it can be used on any machine.

The application is still in beta, however, I haven't found any bugs or crashes whilst using it.

This is a must have program for anyone using Adobe or Foxit Reader.

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n/a Parcel (IP:62.252.32.16) Thu 07-6-07 10:52 CDT Hi Von, yeh , its does exactly whats says it can do, highly recomended. It opens up instantly even large files Its brill! Parcel Reply | Quote 1   0

Von (Publisher) Thu 07-6-07 14:26 CDT I really love it. I just wish it was more widely known. 5 Starts to Krzysztof Kowalczyk for this excellent app! Reply | Quote 0   0

Excellent software! Cesar (IP:201.152.124.111) Fri 01-2-08 18:49 CST 5 stars! Reply | Quote 0   0

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