Recently, I became annoyed enough with constant prompts for software updates and pop-up messages from Adobe that I decided to try alternatives to Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader. (I swear, they must know how annoyed people get with the constant nagging for software updates.) It turns out that there are some excellent alternatives, and if you deal with .PDF content a lot, they can save you time, hassle and disk space.
For Windows users, Foxit Reader is a completely free, useful utility for viewing .PDF files. It has a very small footprint, taking up only 2MB of disk space–about one-tenth what Adobe Reader takes. Best of all, you can perform many functions that you would typically turn to the expensive verson of Adobe Acrobat for, including editing text in .PDFs, annotating files, and saving completed .PDF forms.
In addition to taking up much less disk space than Adobe’s offerings, Foxit Reader just feels fast. It loads faster, and I get work done faster in it.
Preview, Mac OS X’s .PDF utility, is actually pretty good, but there are other tools for Mac users who want to extend what they do with .PDFs. Judi Sohn did a post on PDFPen which is a good way for Mac OS X users to extend what they do with .PDFs. It costs $50, but you can merge pages together from multiple .PDFs, cut .PDFs, sign electronic .PDF documents, repurpose .PDF content, and more. Check out PDFPen’s matrix comparing its features to Adobe Acrobat.
