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April 14, 2008 12:00 AM PDT

Featured Freeware: Foxit Reader

by Seth Rosenblatt
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Adobe Reader is monstrously large, slow to load, and includes many features most users will hardly ever need. Foxit PDF Reader pares down its PDF-reading code and comes up with some neat features, like annotation tools, to give you a PDF reader that's far more appropriate for the average PDF user.

PDFs open from the Internet in their own Foxit window, instead of sucking browser resources, and the interface mimics Adobe's so you won't have to change your reading habits. In our test, the text readability wasn't much inferior to Acrobat's. The 1.6MB program starts surprisingly fast. Foxit's biggest flaw in the old version was hogging memory and that has been corrected. We did find it incredibly irritating that URL hyperlinks were unclickable, and that some features were secretly blocked in the freeware copy.

Seth peers into the deep, dark corners of software so that you don't have to. He has yet to suffer a single nightmare about OS/2. You can follow him on Twitter.
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by chettyharish April 14, 2008 12:50 AM PDT
i stick with adobe reader :)
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by stevens73 April 14, 2008 1:21 AM PDT
Foxit has been my favourite pdf reader for the past 3 years. It is extremely useful for people like me who update their hardware only once in several years because of its efficient use of computing resources.
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by ohilthegreat April 14, 2008 8:03 PM PDT
I personally prefer Foxit to adobe reader... adobe reader, in my opinion, looks good and feels great, but if you have a good processor to support it... otherwise it makes you realize that you dont need any good looks for just viewing a pdf...

But foxit has some problems opening fdf files which reader manages to do flawlessly
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by bighomer April 14, 2008 10:03 PM PDT
Hmmm...
Nice to have alternatives to Adobe Reader (I always hated that thing). Personally I prefer SumatraPDF portable, a nice small freeware app. Of course, it won't display some files right, but it's a real lightweight and it works fine for me.
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by ursfriend2006 April 14, 2008 11:13 PM PDT
i want to tri acrobat new version
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by wodniloc April 15, 2008 9:19 AM PDT
I liked this and used it for a while but found that there were a number of problems with font substitution on it that messed up the entire document, especially when printing, whereas the document would look and print fine using Adobe Reader. Didn't always happen, but happened enough to go back to Adobe.
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by misakii23 May 27, 2008 1:13 AM PDT
I gotta use this, others say it's really good.
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