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Editor's Corner
Dumping Adobe: What's the best alternative PDF utility?
Adobe Reader (the program formerly known as Adobe Acrobat Reader) is by the far the most popular software for reading PDF files. And why wouldn't it be? The Portable Document Format (PDF) was originally created by Adobe way back in 1993, and for a long time their reader was the only one available for viewing these files. It doesn't cost anything; unlike its "big brother," Adobe Acrobat (which is used for creating and editing PDFs), it's distributed free on Adobe's web site.
Over the years, PDF became a wildly popular format, and many web sites provide downloadable documents in PDF format. PDFs are useful because they provide a fixed layout for documents. With word processing files such as Word .doc or docx files, documents may render differently on different computers, even running the same word processing software. PDFs will always display the same every time, regardless of what operating system you're running or what PDF reading software you're using to view them.
For a long time, Adobe Reader was installed on almost every computer, but the many security vulnerabilities that have been discovered in the Reader software causes many computer users to be concerned about the risks of using the program. It seems as if almost every week brings another report of a new security flaw in Adobe's software. And there are now many alternatives to Adobe for viewing PDF files. Although PDF was originally a proprietary format, Adobe released it as an open standard a few years ago. Although Adobe owns the patent, they license them royalty-free so anyone can create software to read or edit PDFs without paying Adobe.
One of the first alternative PDF tools to become popular was Foxit Reader, which has been around for many years. Like Adobe's Reader, the viewer-only version is a free download. Perhaps playing on Adobe's reputation for ongoing vulnerabilities, Foxit offers a number of security options, including a security warning dialog box to warn you if a PDF tries to run an external command, a safe mode operation that blocks suspicious external commands from being run, verification of digital signatures, the ability to disable JavaScript, and support for ASLR ad DEP.
One advantage of Foxit, especially on netbooks and other low powered machines, is that it is less of a resource hog than Adobe Reader. It uses less memory and starts up more quickly, and may also respond faster in use (which might not be noticeable on a powerful machine but will be on low-end systems). Foxit is probably the best known of the PDF reader alternatives. You can get it at
http://www.win7news.net/3T4K9H/110429-Foxit
But what if you not only want to view PDFs, but also need to be able to make your own, or edit those created by others? At one time, that meant you had to buy the "full Acrobat" software from Adobe, which was frighteningly expensive. The current Acrobat X suite costs $799 (or $199 to upgrade if you've purchased an earlier version). Foxit's Editor goes for a more reasonable $99, or $49 for the upgrade version. But you don't even have to pay that much if you only want to do simple editing.
My favorite PDF utility is PDF Xchange by Tracker Software, and I've been using it on all my computers for the last couple of year. It's free, and unlike some programs, the free version can legally be used for commercial purposes as well as private/personal use. It runs on Windows systems from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 (including 64 bit), and it allows you the limited ability to modify and manipulate existing PDF files, annotate/add comments, type text into documents, highlight text, add shapes and objects to a page, add images and signatures, add hyperlinks and fill in and save PDF forms. It has a nice tabbed interface so you can quickly see what PDF documents you have open.
If that's not enough, the Pro version lets you convert images and text directly to PDF without a third party solution, lets you extract content from PDFs to text and image formats, supports digital signatures, lets you add and modify bookmarks, and more. Its cost is only $34.50. Progressively more expensive versions add additional functionality, such as Office integration, but the most expensive of them is only $74 per license - still less than Foxit Editor and far, far less than Acrobat. You can find out more about PDF-XChange here:
http://www.win7news.net/3T4K9H/110429-P ... nge-Viewer
Of course, if you have Office 2010, you can save your Word documents as PDFs directly within Word, without using a PDF editor (however, you can't directly make changes to them once they're PDFs). You just choose PDF from the drop down list in the "Save As" dialog box. There was a plug-in for Office 2007 that you could manually install to provide this same functionality. And there are a number of third party programs that will allow you to go in the opposite direction; that is, you can convert PDFs to Word documents so you can edit them in Word. An example is deskUNPDF, which you can find out more about here:
http://www.win7news.net/3T4K9H/110429-DocuDesk
What software do you use to work with PDFs on your Windows 7 computer? Do you go with the old standard from Adobe? If so, do you worry about its propensity for security vulnerabilities, and keep it updated? If you use an alternative, which one do you like and why? Is a reader all you need, or do you also have to create and edit PDF files? Have you laid out the big bucks for Adobe Acrobat? If so, what makes it worth the extra cost to you? If you use a lower-cost or free editor, which one? What do you like about it? Do you love or hate PDFs themselves, or are you indifferent? We invite you to discuss this topic in our forum at
http://www.win7news.net/3T4K9H/110429-Forum
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