Best PDF viewer?

foxit is fast no obvious bugs

Martin

thing

which

I can't say that I've had the sort of problems with Adobe Reader that you are experiencing. It always works fine on my computer.

When ecvaluating alternarives to Adobe Acrobat Reader, be sure to test the ability to save a PDF to disk and retrieve it later.

On a sunny day (Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:41:46 -0800 (PST)) it happened "David L. Jones" wrote in :

Linux, xpdf. Starts up in about 1 second (try that with Adobe), and never complains about 'non existing Chinese fonts'.

I have to Agree with Ross. No problems here with Adobe Acrobat (reader or writer, or "printer") Sadly, can't say the same for Adobe Illustrator-10 !! Which soured my on Adobe products COMPLETELY. (Well, until PhotoShop elements came out and I had to give up...)

But to your point, ProntoPDF (free download, I think) seems to work well. I think it's a writer too.

Before going off the deep end, you might try ripping (uninstalling) all the Adobe PDF stuff you might have on the machine (older version, drivers, etc...) and try a re-install. There are just too many copies in use for this to be a software problem IMO. It is probably some quirk with your PC., which I agree, is still very aggrevating.!! :(

One more thing, if you have external self-sign security features (you would know if you did), I do know these cause a lot of problems with Acrobat version higher than 5. Maybe you can turn those features OFF in your version? Doubtful. Or, screw it, just back to Ver-5, which by all accounts seems to be the best version ever release. (?) -mpm

Foxit reader 20, never looked back. Yes, adobe reader is really bad, indeed.

I use Foxit to view pdf's and CutePDF to make them. Both are blindingly fast compared to the Adobe bloatware, and neither seems to have problems.

I don't use Foxit as a plugin, but as an external application launcher.

John

"David L. Jones" hath wroth:

Version number?

If you look at the running processes, you'll find that every time Acrobat 6.x and possibly 7.x exit, they leave ACRORD32.EXE running. My machines would hang trying to kill this program on shutdown and failing. There's a check box in the settings to disable this behavior, but it doesn't work. However, with 8.x, the program does a clean exit and leaves nothing behind. Also, if you manually kill ACRORD32.EXE after Acrobat exits, your unspecified version of Windoze will shut down fairly cleanly.

You might also install User Profile Hive Cleanup:

Despite the lofty description, it's a bug fix for a bunch of house keeping that MS forgot to do when shutting down. I've installed it on everything W2K and XP with great success. However, it doesn't work with 64 bit Windows or Vista.

In the past, Acrobat Reader was really awful. With 6.x, I was guaranteed a hung computer within about 10 minutes of running the browser plugin version of Acrobat. With the release of 8.x, such problems seem to have gone away. If you're getting hangs, perhaps a later version might help?

Also see user sites such as:

for possible alternatives. See:

and click on "Viewers" for 57 possible alternatives.

As others have responded: Foxit Reader for viewing. While not perfect, I used it 100% for looking at data sheets. Comes up fast and works well. If you use Mozilla, there are ways of preventing Acrobat from coming up in your browser.

I use PDFCreator for my PDF printer driver. Another wrapper around GhostScript.

Nope, it happens on every machine I use, even on brand new installs. Perhaps I'm just a heavier user of PDF's than most. Note that Acrobat reader works just fine *most* of the time, even if it is quite slow, but when it doesn't like something it crashes big time (esp the browser plug-in). Then when you combine it with other programs and have been opening and closing it all day long, it seems to hog memory and has to be shut down manually when you try to exit windows. Again, not in every case, but when it happens it's really annoying. I also don't care if it's acrobats fault or a combination with something else, it's acrobat that always locks up.

I've installed Foxit and everything is right with the world again (so far), the speed difference is just incredible! It doesn't seem to have a free browser plug-in though, but that's not a big deal.

Thanks. Dave.

Thanks Jeff, that explains the shutdown problem I've always had. I was using version 8 and still had lots of problems.

I've switched to Foxit and the performance difference is just incredible, blows Acrobat out of the water, and it's 10 times smaller. Will trial it and see how it goes.

Thanks Dave.

'Foxit'. From a recommend on this group. Use nothing else. Leagues faster than the poxy Adobe offering. About 0.3 seconds from click to view.

Same here - it's been the same on many PCs and OSs. . Tony

(snip)

is that the Jaws/5D one? I find it occasionally does funny things with fonts.

I get the same failure David gets with Acrobat when shutting down.

Ed

I would like reader & creator in one program...anything (other than Adobe) available?

And what happens when you try to save that data sheet to your hard disk?

Until you try saving the PDF you are reading to your hard drive...