PDF Readers

In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Chris Hogg snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net writes

I've tried some of the others, but I've been using

SumatraPDF, fast and light.

it doesn't allow form filling, I use Acrobat if I need to do that.

the latest version allows annotations but I don't generally use them.

Having tried pretty well all of them I also settled on pdf-xchange-viewer. Some functions are, of course, disabled on the free version but there are plenty of free apps that do the odd thing such as removing pages. Due to the name of the company I spent a couple of months looking at reviews and reading Tracker's forums. The forums are very good, with Devs and Tech Support ever-present.

Not really, the adobe is probably most likely to work,but half the problems with pdfs is the creators are so lazy they often just use a picture of a document and then if you need that to be accessible to maybe a blind person it simply won't be no matter what reader you use. Also sighted folk complain if fuzzy characters due to poor scanning.

There is one that tuns pdfs into text, but this can lead to reading order anomalies if the file has no tags. This is accessible pdf reader from webby. Most of the rest are much of a muchness, but many browsers can read pdf as can modern versions of Word of course, with variable success. Brian

What sort of 'force'. I use Foxit to open, read and print pdf files without difficulty. I close all pop-ups on autopilot.

PDF-XChange have withdrawn their free "Viewer" and replaced it with a free "Editor" which does everything their Viewer did.

Although I have Pdf-XChange Editor installed, I personally prefer Adobe Reader.

I used to use Foxit as it /used/ to be a 1MB download and started instantly. I forget why I stopped. I've gone back to Adobe which is only a /slight/ pain in the butt.

On 02 Sep 2021, Chris Hogg wrote

I've used the free "PDFXchange Viewer" for many years, which has always done everything I need. It has all the editing functions I've use; I don't recall it ever pushing me towards a paid-for upgrade.

The current version appears to have last been updated in 2018, but it works fine with Windows 10; I've not noticed anything lacking in it.

If I click on a PDF, for example if I want to download it or read it, this pop-up appears offering me 14 days free trial or purchase of their PDF editor. It won't go away AFAICS. If I want to download or read the PDF I have to save the file on my PC, open Foxit reader and then open the file. It's a two-stage process, whereas before it was just one stage. I will investigate autopilot. Is it a Windows thing, am I likely to have it on my PC as part of Windows or is it something off the Internet? I already have Adblock Plus, Ghostery and uBlock Origin and thought one or the other blocked pop-ups. But not this one it seems.

The free version of their PDF editor isn't too shabby either. It was the only one I found that could handle certain UK government documents that contained a shabby mixture of various abortions inserted by consecutive edits under many different versions of the real Adobe PDF editor.

Every other PDF editor I tried could not handle them at all. Even PDF Xchange struggled with one field which displayed white text on white and would revert to that whenever you tried to print the document!

You could select the characters in the box and paste them elsewhere to verify what was present but there was no way to print them out.

Perhaps I am missing something, but I have no problems with Acrobat Reader.

Chris

Autopilot is part of the liveware :-)

It's not as bug-ridden as it used to be a few years ago, depends how you use it, in a busy office it can get its claws a bit deep into the system, integrating with outlook, stealing file associations, ending up with 20 copies of acrord32 hogging the machine ...

Well, thanks, but I'm actually none the wiser :-(

I have just received a Newsletter, which I opened and read using Foxit Reader without encountering any of the issues you describe.

Try this.

Sumatra PDF and Evince for Windows.