Free PDF Viewer and Reader that’s Better than Foxit Viewer

Update 6/7/2012 – It looks as though this product is no longer free. That means Foxit is still the best one overall. 

Does anyone still use Adobe Reader? If you do, I feel bad for you! For many months now, I’ve been usingthe very fast Foxit PDF reader software because it’s only 100 times faster than Adobe Reader! Foxit is a great PDF viewer because it’s not bloated with tons of useless features that no one is ever going to use. Foxit has been a great replacement, but the free version has had some problems that make it slightly annoying to use sometimes.

If you’ve been using Foxit reader for a while, you have probably noticed that it can have some issues when it comes to printing. If you decide to add a sticky note or manually type in text onto a PDF, you get a message stating that an evaluation mark will be placed on the document when you try to print it. You have to purchase the full version if you don’t want to have the marks.

Luckily, there’s another PDF viewer program that I came across called PDF-XChange Viewer that has all of the features and benefits of Foxit, but without any of the restrictions! With this program, you can export text from a PDF document, add content to PDF files, type onto PDF’s, fill and save forms, add sticky notes, and lots more. The best thing is that it’s way faster than Adobe Reader and only a little slower than Foxit. There is a splash screen on this program, but you can disable it from the Preferences.

Another really nice thing about PDF-XChange Viewer is that it has a really nice GUI interface. Foxit looks kind of old (probably why it’s faster), but I found that the nice interface is well worth a half second extra loading time. It also has a grid view whereby you can view all of the open PDF documents in a grid format with thumbnails along with document names.

Some other really nice features of this program are the fact that when you place a sticky note onto a document, you can actually place it over text and the note will become transparent so that you can read the text below the note itself! Also, when you are opening a file, you can see a preview of it to the right of the Open dialog box.

One other feature that I liked about this program is that it has a button whereby you can open the PDF in other PDF reader program directly. So if the PDF-XChange Viewer cannot load the PDF document correctly, you can open it from the other PDF viewers you have installed. Pretty cool.

Finally, PDF-XChange Viewer took a really nice feature from Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox whereby each PDF document that is currently open has it’s own tab at the top left. You can switch between documents by clicking on the different tabs! Nice!

Overall, it’s a great PDF Viewer and has been working well in my tests. I’ve had an issue with the text not showing up correctly in the Sticky Note for some reason. Otherwise, everything has been pretty smooth. Test it out and post a comment on which PDF reader you like the most. Enjoy!