Stop using Adobe Acrobat Reader

*cough* Sumatra *cough*

Foxit Reader, while it's not open source, it is free and very fast, you can have a PDF open in Foxit and be on to reading the second page before Acrobat Reader has even finishes opening itself let alone the PDF file.

Need to untick toolbar and ebay desktop rubbish during install, but otherwise it's great.

Foxit reader.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

Sumatra you say? I'll have to check it out.

I used foxit reader for years until they put in the ebay toolbar or whatever it is. It looked similar enough to spyware to make me uninstall foxit and go back to Adobe. Adobe has improved itself but I guess they forgot to hire security peeps in their stuffy Fremont HQ. I could draw parallels here but I don't want to kick off a flame war.

Just installed one of its patch ("upgrade"), it crashes every time I open a linked PDF...

it is somewhat annoying that now i need to pay attention when installing this to remember and remove the sh...t-toolbar checkbox but otherwise why the clumsy adobe reader?

Foxit is far superior to handling PDF documents than the creator's own reader. I've been watching unhappily for years as Adobe's Reader has just been diving in performance and bloating in... I don 't know what. It's not like the Reader has to do complex mathematical 3D computations or hi-def video conversions. It's ridiculous, I don't know how a company as high-profile and accomplished in the industry as Adobe is can willingly let loose a garbadge, yet essential, product like that.

All you have to do is use Adobe Reader for 5 seconds to tell it's one of the worst designed pieces of s*** software ever. It's big, impossibly slow, and has horrible UI. Why does it scale anything I open to 200+% by default? I have a nice high resolution monitor so I can see more stuff at once, not to look at 1/3 of a page at a time. And why does it take hundreds of megabytes of RAM? With that much memory it could render and cache whole documents in raw uncompressed form and scroll through them instantly... but no, it still takes half a second to scroll down a few lines. Somehow it doesn't surprise me that it also has s*** security.

thanks for the alternatives - i'll check them out

acrobat is about 99.9% bloat-clag and 0.1% useful document reader.

why do adobe insist on adding more features that are not needed? are they trying to justify their jobs? it makes the dam thing take ages to load in and it puts itself in the startup and it auto updates - all the things you'd want configure manually.

i think it should also be avoided for bloat reasons.

If you want the most smoothe scrolling then Sumatra wins the lot.

Foxit was the worst and can cause headaches, adobe was better but you can see it loading up arround you, so if browse quick this will have white patches.

enjoy your javascripts.

Preview
It comes as standard on a MAc.
Preview
Just works, small footprint, not a product of Adobe (an ancient word meaning "bloated POS".
Preview
Did I mention it comes with the Mac?
Preview
Even has a browser plugin that comes as standard also.

Hahahahahaha.
Apple win again.

Just tried Sumatra:

The default setting for Sumatra are horrible, if you zoom to width, and then try to scroll wheel scroll you only get the top of each page, the scroll bar only scroll on the current page as do the cursor keys, same scrolling problem if you set it to facing to view two pages at once, you have to select the continuous view opions to get a real scroll. slow scrolling is only smoother than Foxit because it's so slow. Fast scolling using scroll bar drag is useless in Sumatra as you have to wait for contents to display, in Foxit page contents are always displayed even when fast scrolling.

Page bookmark side bar has no minimize in sumatra you have to go into menu to turn in on or off. Foxit is faster to open files but only just.

I'll stick to Foxit for now.

Evince is good, it came preinstalled with Ubuntu, but I bet there should be ports to Win, Mac, Solaris and god-knows-what else.

http://projects.gnome.org/evince/

I've been using foxit for a year or so. I install it on all my client"s computers. Adobe couldn't give me their POS software if it was free.

+1 SUMATRA PDF reader!!!

104MB = Adobe 9 Installer
4MB = Foxit Reader Installer

Nuff said

104MB = Adobe 9 Installer
4MB = Foxit Reader Installer
1MB = Sumatra

if you have any graphic pdf, Sumatra is smoother when using space or left dragging.

if you want lots of extras then go for more bloat, one with gps and satnav facecracks etc.

*sigh* Tried the alternatives but had to go back to the Adobe version. I use DoPDF to convert to PDF but Sumatra or Foxit would not print them properly.

You vill use dis operating system and dis software, and you vill pay 50% more for eet!

Vee alvays vin!

Vee alvays take ur money, vell vee don't even take it, you geeve it to us, muwhahaha!

Our glorious leader ees vundergoing DNA Regeneration and Biotechnik Regveration!

He vill return to lead us onto even greater glorees!

Raise the red banner! SALUTE!

It is pretty good. Like most of you I have tried most of the free options, and settled on this due to interface and options provided. It loads fast and for me at least, doesn't cause any eyestrain while moving around large pdf's with graphics on the page.

Up to you of course, but doesn't hurt to take a look..

http://www.docu-track.com/downloads/users/

Try this one - sorry about that People

http://www.docu-track.com/home/prod_user/PDF-XChange_Tools/pdfx_viewer

I liked Foxit so much I actually bought a copy so I could edit PDFs. At least on the editing front Adobe Acrobat is better, but for everything else Foxit is superior.

Acrobat also has a few *fundamental* flaws that make it unusable for me. It's pseudo multi-document interface is completely unsuitable for document viewing, because I very often need to have two documents open at once, and don't want to have them confined in the same damn window. Another completely obnoxious flaw is that it forces you to view the PDF's pages in the manner the author wants you to: single-page, continuous, one-page-per-screen, etc. Acrobat would even RESET MY ZOOM on scrolling. Total garbage. See you in hell Acrobat.

Due to the hopeless way some ads are coded (I guess) on some sites (not this one, so far) everything else is reduced to a crawl. My processor seems to be flooded at 100% usage. I've tried complainig to Yahoo (a big offender with its bloody Bingo ads) with nil response.

Finally switched to Firefox and plugin zaps Flash ads. Fraid that includes the innocent parties on the Inq.

Blame Adobe -- the same berks whose reader always closes my browser when I finish reading a PDF on line.