So recently, I actually wondered for just a moment why on earth I was still using Adobe Reader (AR) to view PDFs. Given Adobe’s record in the software they make, and how much of a tedious, clunky, slow hassle it is to open and view PDFs (which are a particularly crappy format technically speaking anyway, despite their universality), I started to ask around for alternative readers (that were FREE). Friends and a Google search revealed two other products: Foxit, and PDF XChange.
I downloaded these and gave them both a whirl. As usual, trying to find even the simplest objective test of software by relying on either the rest of humanity on the internet or the marketing spielers, resulted in nothing of immediate value. So here’s a quick summary of my thoughts of the two PDF reader alternatives to Adobe Reader after a simple 10 minute play around. I was only interested in opening and reading PDFs—none of the other whizz-bangs that may also be present (which may be very useful to some I should say in fairness). I was also interested in system resource use and efficiency of getting a PDF open, navigated and read.
Foxit: it opens quicker than AR and consumes a comparable amount of memory (somewhat less actually when usage becomes larger). It has a much faster renderer than AR (I'm guessing a factor of 4 or 5 from subjective testing—but clearly noticeable). The installation file is small (~5mb instead of AR’s ~20mb), and its in-browser reader is very nippy. Not much else to say, it’s a no-brainer to replace AR with this if not PDF XChange.
PDF XChange: I really like this software—I prefer it to Foxit. It has a larger installation file than Foxit (~12mb), and its Firefox PDF reading plugin doesn’t seem to work for me (so I use Foxit’s), to state a couple of negatives first off. However, the way it deals with PDFs is very interesting. Both Foxit and AR render everything on the fly to keep memory usage down to a minimum. Both Foxit and AR do consume quite a lot of memory though when zoomed in on pages with complex content, so they aren’t always minimalist in their memory footprint. PDF XChange however uses memory very interestingly. Once it has rendered the document content visible on screen, it stores the bitmap in memory and navigation simply blits it back. This means navigation is incredibly smooth! However, this also means it can consume HUGE amounts of memory. I was a bit bothered by this at first—until I realised there's a setting to cap the memory usage. It’s a lot like Xara’s caching system in this respect. Most PDF documents (which contain text and simple images) load MUCH faster than even in Foxit. You can blaze through PDFs with this software. However, one area ripe for improvement is that if you load a really graphically intensive image, it can take a very long time to render, and nothing seems to display on the page until it is fully rendered. Initially when I first saw this, I thought it had failed or something. Once loaded of course, it is super fast. But these kinds of graphically intensive situations are likely less common for most. A little more on the memory usage: if you change the zoom level of a page, it needs to be re-rendered so a new blit can be used. The memory consumed by the previous blit on a per-page basis is released however; its memory handling is very good. The higher the zoom level, the more memory is needed to store the bigger bitmap. The memory cap is not on by default, but should be really. I limited it to about 300 mb and it works perfectly and never generates disc swapping issues. This software has really taken the back-and-crack ache out of PDF reading, and I'm just amazed I didn't look sooner.
I strongly recommend people replace AR immediately with both Foxit (for its browser reader) and PDF XChange for the standalone viewer. If PDF XChange fixed the issue with not displaying very complex PDF pages for a while when first opened, it would have received flawless marks from me. I think PDF XChange also has other features for free that you have to upgrade Foxit (read: pay for) to access, but I'm not completely sure about this.
Hope people find this info useful.
Xhris
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