Replacing Adobe Reader--Foxit, Sumatra, or something else?

Best free alternative to Adobe Reader?


  • Total voters
    22

conceptualclarity

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Aug 23, 2013
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I understand that Adobe Reader is very vulnerable to the cyber-criminals. I also really dislike how heavy and sluggish it is.

So what is my best alternative? I want something that's
1. more secure than Adobe
2. much lighter and faster
3. as good as Adobe in terms of allowing one to highlight and annotate
4. free
5. I want to be able to copy highlighted text to my clipboard. It seems like I used to be able to do that with Adobe.
 

Ink

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Jan 8, 2011
22,361
Do you use Windows 8? If so, have you tried Adobe Reader Touch. Available from the Windows Store.


  • Quickly open PDF documents from email, the web, or anywhere on your device
  • Easily find your most recently read documents
  • View password-protected PDFs, annotations, and drawing markups
  • View and Add Notes to your document
  • Highlight, Strikeout, and Underline text
  • Search text to find specific information
  • Select single page or continuous scroll modes
  • Easily zoom in on text or images for a closer view
  • Go to any page quickly by tapping on the Page Number indicator
  • Use bookmarks to jump directly to a section in your PDF document
  • Quickly navigate through large documents using the Semantic Zoom thumbnail view
  • Tap on links in a PDF to open linked web pages
  • Share PDFs with other applications using "Share"
  • Email PDFs as attachments
  • Print your PDFs from within Reader
  • Fill and Save PDF forms
 

BoraMurdar

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Aug 30, 2012
6,598
Sumatra

among PDF It reads eBook (ePub, Mobi), XPS, DjVu, CHM, Comic Book (CBZ and CBR).
It's super light
it should be secure enough

for more features like highlighting and
annotation go for Foxit (but it has retarded function when copying text from pdf, spacing goes crazy)

 

Littlebits

Retired Staff
May 3, 2011
3,893
Sumatra PDF is very light contains no ads in the GUI like others do and no bundled adware.
It also opens very fast even when magnifying small pdf documents.

If you don't want to install a PDF reader then use Google Chrome and Google Documents which will open them online without downloading files to your system. This will keep malicious PDF documents from infecting your system.

Enjoy!! :D
 

conceptualclarity

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Aug 23, 2013
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Sumatra

among PDF It reads eBook (ePub, Mobi), XPS, DjVu, CHM, Comic Book (CBZ and CBR).
It's super light
it should be secure enough

for more features like highlighting and
annotation go for Foxit (but it has retarded function when copying text from pdf, spacing goes crazy)

Yea, I want highlighting and annotation and would really like good copying of text.

If you don't want to install a PDF reader then use Google Chrome and Google Documents which will open them online without downloading files to your system. This will keep malicious PDF documents from infecting your system.

I do like to collect good PDFs. I usually remember to give them a good scanning.

sumatra is nice and fiast ,lighter too. For extra pcked features try Nitro PDF. Though it isn't that fast as sumatra

I thought Nitro was shareware. Does it have impressive free features?
 

conceptualclarity

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I got both Foxit and Nitro to try them out, and if I'm not satisfied I may try out Sumatra and others.

One factor impelling me was Adobe was horrendously slow in opening PDFs in browsers. Now I find I cannot open a PDF in Firefox with Nitro or Foxit, even with the plug-ins for the other and Adobe disabled. It eventually sends the browser into terminal unresponsiveness. So I had to go to Maxthon to open a PDF, and it worked pretty well. I don't know what Maxthon uses for PDFs.

I'm displeased with Firefox. It's also showing me no image on videos. Looking forward to using PaleMoon on my next system.
 

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