Author Topic: So, what pdf reader app is your fav? (Read 48992 times)

ewemoa · « **Reply #25 on:** August 17, 2015, 08:31 AM »

I had been using the viewing capabilities of Firefox and Chromium until recently, but I was reminded by "a little bird" that a browser's context is one I ought to be careful of.

Still using PDF XChange Viewer and Sumatra (and was before the reminder too)

aarontx · « **Reply #26 on:** August 19, 2015, 07:50 AM »

I prefer Sumatra

Curt · « **Reply #27 on:** August 19, 2015, 09:20 AM »

I prefer Sumatra
-aarontx (August 19, 2015, 07:50 AM)

I am proudly quoting this answer, because it's been almost 3 years since aarontx's previous post!

Are you one of them Texas cowboys that can go all day saying nothing but ahum... yeah, well..., aha... see you next year.

Innuendo · « **Reply #28 on:** August 22, 2015, 02:28 PM »

For the PDF being so open and standardized, the programs that are used to view and edit them are anything but. Nearly all of them have weird little quirks and idiosyncrasies that keep them from being the perfect solution. What makes the situation even more laughable is that the gold standard in the field, Adobe, are the most non-standard and frustrating products of them all.

I think I've worked my way through every free solution & found something irksome about nearly every one. Now I'm starting to trial paid solutions and so far it seems like opening your wallet doesn't yield less of a mess, but a bigger mess spread amongst more features.

wraith808 · « **Reply #29 on:** August 22, 2015, 08:06 PM »

I've started reading on my ipad truthfully. The offerings there are much more reader friendly.

Lintalist · « **Reply #30 on:** August 24, 2015, 01:37 PM »

PDF XChange Viewer for opening many PDFs (tabs!) and Sumatra in conjunction with Lister (the viewer in the shareware filemanager Total Commander).

mwb1100 · « **Reply #31 on:** August 24, 2015, 02:07 PM »

I used to use Sumatra for its browser integration, but have since relied on the Firefox jsPDF capability for that.

For stand-alone reading I use STDU for it's tabbed interface and lack of crapware loaded in it's installer. I also get the sense that it's less likely to be vulnerable to an exploit, but I'm basing that mainly on the fact that it's not Adobe and that I'm pretty sure it doesn't support scripting (which i think is sometimes the vector for malware in PDFs).

If Sumatra supported a tabbed interface, I'd probably use that just by virtue of it being open source. Last time I looked, the Sumatra dev wasn't interested in adding tabbed viewing.

Lintalist · « **Reply #32 on:** August 24, 2015, 02:13 PM »

@mwb1100: I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, Sumatra v3.0 has tabs - "The biggest change in this version is addition of tabs, contributed by Stefan Stefanov." http://blog.kowalczy...PDF-30-released.html :-)

mwb1100 · « **Reply #33 on:** August 24, 2015, 02:46 PM »

@mwb1100: I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, Sumatra v3.0 has tabs - "The biggest change in this version is addition of tabs, contributed by Stefan Stefanov." http://blog.kowalczy...PDF-30-released.html :-)
-Lintalist (August 24, 2015, 02:13 PM)

Once again my world-class laziness is exposed on the Internet for all to see. I swear that as I was typing the message I thought, "I should check if Sumatra has tabs now", but then I thought: "eh, someone will let me know..."

Unfortunately for me, now I have some work to do seeing if I like Sumatra 3.x.

Thanks for the update!

Deozaan · « **Reply #34 on:** August 25, 2015, 12:41 AM »

Lately I've been using Foxit Reader.

Be sure to go into View -> UI Options -> Change Toolbar Mode... and change it from Ribbon style to Classic style.

That's the only way I've found to get the menu items to stop yelling at you. (e.g. FILE becomes File)

Screenshot - 8_24_2015 , 11_43_27 PM.png

Screenshot - 8_24_2015 , 11_43_27 PM.png

wraith808 · « **Reply #35 on:** August 25, 2015, 10:00 AM »

I was using Foxit reader for the longest time- then they grew to big for common sense and started including stuff in the installer and in the program for advertising. Has that changed?

Deozaan · « **Reply #36 on:** August 25, 2015, 10:09 AM »

I was using Foxit reader for the longest time- then they grew to big for common sense and started including stuff in the installer and in the program for advertising. Has that changed?
-wraith808 (August 25, 2015, 10:00 AM)

Good question.

I use ninite to install it, so I didn't get any extras. And I don't read PDFs very often on my computer, but I haven't seen any in-software advertising. Then again, I also have AdGuard installed, so maybe it's blocking the ads.

mwb1100 · « **Reply #37 on:** August 26, 2015, 12:48 AM »

Unfortunately for me, now I have some work to do seeing if I like Sumatra 3.x.
-mwb1100 (August 24, 2015, 02:46 PM)

I think I'll be sticking with STDU for now. Sumatra's tabs are nice, but they don't scale very well to 10 or more - it just keeps squeezing tabs onto a single row, making them smaller an smaller. STDU will get to a point where it'll scroll them, and also has a window where all the tabs are listed.

STDU also has a nice "search all" feature that's missing from Sumatra.

On the other hand, I have several PDFs that use ligatures (mostly character combinations of "fi") and Sumatra handles copy/paste and searching of text that contains ligatures perfectly (by converting the ligatures to the equivalent ASCII characters). STDU doesn't do this conversion, so searches must contain the ligature character code and pastes of that text generally needs to be fixed up.

So I'll keep an eye on Sumatra.

c.gingerich · « **Reply #38 on:** August 26, 2015, 01:33 PM »

Kami - Chrome plugin PDF (and other documents) viewer/mark-up tool. Love it and use it every day.

jaden · « **Reply #39 on:** August 26, 2015, 11:53 PM »

Sumatra here.

I used to use Foxit, then PDF-XChange Viewer. Sumatra is so fast though. It makes me giddy

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #40 on:** September 02, 2015, 06:40 AM »

Looping this thread into the other one, PDF Exchange Editor seems to me to be the ones to beat now. And I'm about to do a thread on the "best of Freemium" where the free version is *really solid*, and then if the Pro version has any stunning "killer app" extras.

I'm using Motion12's list as a big test after doing a nice multi part crop-merge myself as a proof of concept. I took a medical document, and did "extract pages 1-3,18-20 and save as a single file" perfectly.

This is where "speed" becomes to me absolutely silly of a criterion. If I am gonna end up with a PDF at all, I wanna then get some work done. 2 seconds faster loading isn't worth wasting my time on a viewer.

dr_andus · « **Reply #41 on:** September 02, 2015, 10:18 AM »

Kami - Chrome plugin PDF (and other documents) viewer/mark-up tool. Love it and use it every day.
-c.gingerich (August 26, 2015, 01:33 PM)

+1 for Kami Premium, though I only use it in Chrome OS (except when I need to work across multiple platforms on the same file, for which it is also great). On Windows I prefer PDF XChange Editor Pro.

Looping this thread into the other one, PDF Exchange Editor seems to me to be the ones to beat now. And I'm about to do a thread on the "best of Freemium" where the free version is *really solid*, and then if the Pro version has any stunning "killer app" extras.
-TaoPhoenix (September 02, 2015, 06:40 AM)

Agreed (about the speed point as well), PDF XChange Editor Pro is great. But I found the PDF XChange Printer Lite 2012 (that used to be freely packaged with it) inferior to CutePDF Writer, when it comes to printing image-heavy Word docs of over 300 pages. In fact none of my other PDF printers (MS Word's own, Adobe PDF, SmartDraw) were able to handle it, so kudos to the free CutePDF!

tomos · « **Reply #42 on:** September 02, 2015, 10:26 AM »

I found the PDF XChange Printer Lite 2012 (that used to be freely packaged with it) inferior to CutePDF Writer, when it comes to printing image-heavy Word docs of over 300 pages. In fact none of my other PDF printers (MS Word's own, Adobe PDF, SmartDraw) were able to handle it, so kudos to the free CutePDF!
-dr_andus (September 02, 2015, 10:18 AM)

that is impressive

I have used PDFCreator (via sourceforge) to make some very image heavy PDFs - either with *very* large images, or multiple (50+) high-quality (300dpi) images.
I can highly recommend it - but NOTE that it used come with OpenCandy additional installs (I havent updated it in a good while so out of touch with current status that way).

EDIT//
PS the PDF Creator software has an 'ad-free' version for business @ 3.50€ or 5US$
Not sure do they mean the Open Candy or do they show ads somehow :-/

Curt · « **Reply #43 on:** September 02, 2015, 11:22 AM »

PDFCreator (via sourceforge)
-tomos (September 02, 2015, 10:26 AM)

My Firefox 40 won't open http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfarchitect or http://www.pdfforge.org/blog, but claims these pages contain invalid compression (?) or something in that area. I refuse to apply for membership just to inform the company.

However, my reason for visiting the company in the first place was to recall, how you can build your own pdf application with PDF Architect (the PRO shareware version of PDFCreator)! But what's the point if one can't reach the http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfarchitect page. Can you?

tomos · « **Reply #44 on:** September 02, 2015, 11:30 AM »

what's the point if one can't reach the http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfarchitect page. Can you?
-Curt (September 02, 2015, 11:22 AM)

-
no problems here... FF 40.0.3

Are you using uBlock Origin ?
That was blocking sourceforge pages a while back. I removed it at the time and changed to uBlock (without the 'Origin').

PS I havent used the 'Architect' software.

dr_andus · « **Reply #45 on:** September 02, 2015, 01:00 PM »

I have uBlock Origin in Chrome and can access the page fine. But I don't really get their claim of being the "only customizable PDF editor." Maybe I'm missing something, but their model looks pretty similar to the PDF XChange suite, where you also get incrementally more features as you pay more for the more premium products. In fact the free version of XChange Editor seems to do quite a bit of the paid features of PDF Architect (such as annotation, stamping, OCR, etc. etc.)

mahesh2k · « **Reply #46 on:** September 02, 2015, 01:44 PM »

I've settled for Sumatra it can read CBR, PDF, Mobi and Epub. So I think that's more than what I want.

superboyac · « **Reply #47 on:** September 02, 2015, 03:11 PM »

for just reading: sumatra
for reading + some searching + other light stuff: pdf xchange
hardcore editing: bluebeam
printer driver only: bullzip

Curt · « **Reply #48 on:** September 02, 2015, 04:05 PM »

can't reach the http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfarchitect page. Can you?
-Curt (September 02, 2015, 11:22 AM)
no problems here... FF 40.0.3
Are you using ...
-tomos (September 02, 2015, 11:30 AM)

^ life is weird. I first restarted Firefox (40.0.3) in Safe Mode and went to the bad links. The pages showed up nicely as they should, so the culprit must be one of my addons, I thought. On one hand I was annoyed; "oh, it can take so long time to isolate a malfunctioning extension", on the other hand I felt relieved that it was merely an addon and not my computer.

When my Firefix had been restarted in normal mode, I instinctively re-tested the links before disabling any addons. And now they worked just fine! To make sure, I ran CCleaner > Clean, and then visited the links again. They are now working just fine, and I have no idea why.

----------------------
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printer driver only: bullzip
-superboyac (September 02, 2015, 03:11 PM)

^ thanks for reminding, superboyac, I had forgotten about bullzip.
I often dream about the company's Print to Word, but it's shameless expensive: $69+VAT=$86.25 http://www.bullzip.c...roducts/ptw/info.php

artkaye · « **Reply #49 on:** September 16, 2015, 12:01 PM »

Just downloaded and tried Sumatra 3. The tabs are welcome addition and the gray background is good. I have been using Sumatra for quite some time now and I like it even more with the improvements in version 3. Kudos to the developers.