Adobe Acrobat Could Stand to Shed a Few Pounds

When you are the standard, it is common to become comfortable, the popularity of your product trumping the necessity to introduce changes that are more than just negligible. However, popularity is frequently the result of the familiarity of your product taking priority over its reliability. In every industry, customers exhibit their tendency to stay with the standard out of habit, ignoring blatant flaws that become allowable in the face of the unknown.

One such example is Acrobat Reader, the de facto software used to read .PDF files. PDF ( Portable Document Format ) is the file format made by Adobe Systems for the exchange of documents. Independent of the common variables that are attendant to the compatibility of a file format ( software, hardware, and operating system ), PDF files are self-contained documents of a two-dimensional nature. Until just recently, Acrobat Reader - also created by Adobe Systems - was the the only application that one could use to view a PDF file. Slightly over a year ago, Adobe released the format as an open format, giving the opportunity to read the file with alternative solutions.

Acrobat Reader, like all favored applications that have the already mentioned complacency, has seen its evolution stunted by a scarcity of attention given to performance. Though primarily used for just viewing files, its bloat is obvious, the application consuming roughly 30MB of space. While Acrobat Reader has features that still haven't been adopted by competing software, there are a number of possible choices that offer its core functionality without the surplus baggage.

One option is Evince. Evince is notable for its simplicity, its name accompanied by a tagline that reads, "Simply a document viewer." That is precisely what Evince is, its modest interface underscored by the speed that you'd naturally associate with what is nothing more than a document viewer. A neat addition to Evince is its "Presentation Mode," which handles a PDF as though it is a slideshow. In this mode, each page is treated as a slide. Originally written for use with Linux, there's a Windows version that offers the same features.

Another great alternative is SumatraPDF. For those that simply need to view and print PDF files, SumatraPDF does so without any of the lag one notices when using Acrobat Reader. While plain in appearance, not unlike Evince, its functionality is easy to glean from the simply navigable interface. With just a few buttons, you can take advantage of this tool for the functions that are most utilized by those viewing a PDF : open, page-jump, search. Though its functionality is restricted to just the core jobs we associate with Acrobat Reader, it moves at an impressive speed, with a minimalistic design that spares you the needless trimmings.

Lastly, there's Foxit Reader, an alternative that offers equivalent features without the excesses of Acrobat Reader. Free and available for Windows, Foxit Reader is regarded by many to be the most gratifying choice for those who have sought a usable substitute for Acrobat Reader. One reason for its popularity is the impressive feature set : e-mail the PDF while viewing it, highlight part of the screen and save it as an image, and convert the PDF to text. Those features come with the free version, without any mention of what's included should you get the Foxit Reader Pro Pack. The main feature of the Pro Pack is the ability to edit your PDF files.

In the case of Acrobat Reader, this is but one of the many examples where you'll find that the most popular software isn't always the most practical answer. Acrobat Reader is definitely no slouch, coming from the company that invented the PDF standard, but there's no way to deny that it can stand to lose much of the weight that slows the current version down. Till that's done, the choices discussed above should be more than sufficient to fulfill your needs where viewing PDF files are concerned.

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