Kerkia

Background

Adobe’s PDF (portable document format) has become a standard for exchanging documents. Many tools allow writing PDFs but finding a good PDF viewer is not that easy. You want that viewer to load documents quickly, to be able to print, and if possible to be able to annotate PDF files, to extract text and images, to export to various image formats and, maybemost importantly, to have a good quality of image and text rendering.

Recommendation

It is difficult not to recommend Adobe’s own free reader, Acrobat Reader. This tool is nicely done, very easy to use, and has most basic features you would expect. The rendering is excellent too.

We would like to also mention PDF-XChange Viewer, which basically equals Acrobat Reader in all areas, plus adds capabilities to edit documents, either annotations or shapes. This comes at the price of taking more resources though. In our view this tool is the best free alternative to Acrobat Reader for those who, for some reason, would rather avoid Adobe’s own reader.

Web links

Adobe Acrobat Reader

Web site: http://get.adobe.com/reader/

Download: http://get.adobe.com/reader/

PDF-XChange Viewer

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

Download: http://www.docu-track.com/home/prod_user/PDF-XChange_Tools/pdfx_viewer?act[69]=download