13.06.2020

Small Pdf Reader For Mac

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the most oft-used document types in business. Not only are they a more universal solution to creating well-designed documents, they can also be interactive and secure. So PDFs are a no-brainer for businesses looking for a professional-looking document.

As for the features, iBooks on the Mac has most of the same tools and themes as iBooks on iPhone and iPad, like color options, text size and style customizations, highlighting tools, dictionary lookup, notes, sharing, illustration rendering, voice over, and more. If you are knee-deep in the Apple ecosystem, iBooks is the best e-reader on your Mac. Haihaisoft Reader is a free PDF document Reader and Printer, extremely fast launch speed and rich feature set. It is also for reading PDF document protected by DRM-X platform. It is now available for Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone/iPad. Create professional quality PDF files from virtually any printable document. No adware, No spyware, No malware, No watermarks, No popup - no catch! Completely FREE PDF Converter and Creator - not just a demo or trial version. Print to PDF from virtually any Windows application. No GhostScript or any 3rd-party software needed.

When it comes to viewing those documents, most users believe there to be only one solution - Adobe Reader. However, in many instances, that solution is far and away from the best. It's bulky, slow, and is known to cause issues. To that end, why not use a more lightweight viewer for PDF documents? They exist and many of them are quite good.

This blog post is also available as a TechRepublic Photo Gallery.

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I have come up with what I believe are the five best small footprint PDF viewers that you can use to easily replace Adobe Reader. Let's see which ones made the list.

The Five Apps

1. Foxit Reader

Foxit Reader is, hands down, one of the best alternative PDF viewers for the Windows platform. It's fast, lightweight, has tons of features, and it is free. Foxit Reader also includes the ability to collaborate with other users on PDF documents. With the collaboration feature you can add annotations to PDFs, fill out PDF forms, and share information with social networks. Foxit Reader also provides integration with Docusign to enable users to send, receive, and save documents using the industry standard security platform.

2. Evince

Evince is the GNOME default PDF viewer. It's incredibly lightweight and allows the user to view multiple types of documents. With this simple viewer PDF, Postscript, djvu, tiff, dvi, XPS, SyncTex (support with gedit), and comics books (cbr,cbz,cb7 and cbt) can be viewed. Evince feature-list is short, but useful: View PDFs, view thumbnails, search, view document indexes, print documents, and encrypted document viewing. What more do you need from a PDF viewer? How about speed? Evince is one of the fastest viewers you'll find on the market.

3. Sumatra

Sumatra is another free PDF alternative for the Windows platform. Sumatra is also an open source project, so you can not only download the installation files, you can download the source as well. Sumatra features: Read PDFs and ebooks (ePub and MOBI), tiny footprint, and portable. Very much along the lines of Evince, Sumatra keeps things fast and easy by keeping them simple.

4. SlimPDF

SlimPDF is one of the lightest of the lightweight (coming in at only 1.43 MB) readers for the Windows platform. SlimPDF also offers a plugin (not free) to enable the conversion of PDFs to .doc, .xls, and .ppt files. For anyone that is looking to replace Adobe Reader with a lightning fast application that uses little in the way of resources, SlimPDF is the tool. The company that created SlimPDF also offers an inexpensive PDF Creator tool called Sonic PDF Creator, which retails for $49.95.

5. Nuance PDF Reader

Nuance PDF Reader is the lightweight PDF reader, for the Windows platform, with an abundance of features. It amazes me how this app can squeeze in so many features, yet still retain a smaller footprint than Adobe. With Nuance you can: Convert PDF files to Word, Excel, and RTF (via a hosted web service); use annotation tools (highlight, cross-out, and underline text); fill out and save PDF forms; read virtually any PDF file (including PDF portfolios); print with comments; search; view embedded movies; verify signed documents.

More than one solution

Without PDFs, so much of the world of business would suffer. Thankfully, end-users are not limited to one, overly-bloated, solution named Adobe Reader. Any one of these PDF viewers can easily take the place of Adobe (depending upon your needs). If you're looking for the very basics, look at SlimPDF, Sumatra, or Evince. If you need something feature-rich, look at Foxit or Nuance. One way or another, you are covered for all your PDF viewing needs.

Also read:

Google Chrome is a browser that is growing in popularity. I’ve recently switched to Chrome, myself.

There’s a lot to like about the Chrome browser:

  • Fast
  • Excellent bookmark handling
  • Protected Mode (sandboxed) for more secure browsing and prevention of phishing attacks
  • Built-in Google Sync to keep all your bookmarks synchronized across your computers

Chrome offers built-in basic PDF viewing and PDF conversion of web pages.

Nice as this sounds, Chrome can’t display every kind of PDF. When that happens, you’ll see this message

Best rss reader for mac os. It constantly updates the RSS feeds.

Chrome also lacks some of Reader (and Acrobat’s) navigational features such as Previous View and Next View.

Since Chrome is growing in popularity, of late I’ve received quite a few questions about PDF in Chrome:

  • How do I get Adobe Reader (or Acrobat) to work in Google Chrome?
  • How do I turn off the Chrome PDF viewer?
  • Why does Chrome make huge PDFs?
  • How do I get Chrome to print PDFs as text?

In this blog article, I’ll show you how to:

  1. Use Adobe Reader (or Acrobat) as the default PDF Viewer in Chrome
  2. How to create smaller, better quality PDFs from Chrome

Turning off Chrome’s Built-in PDF Viewer and using Adobe Reader or Acrobat instead

To turn off the Chrome PDF viewer, follow these steps:

  1. Install Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat if it is not already installed
  2. Open Google Chrome
  3. In the address bar, type . . .
    about:plugins
    (that’s the word about a colon (:), then plugins
  4. The Plug-ins Tab will open
  5. Scroll down until you see either Adobe Acrobat or Reader.
    Click the Enable link
  6. Close the Plug-ins tab and restart Chrome.

Better PDF Printing from Chrome

Chrome has some nice printing features such as a built-in page preview and an ink-saving black and white option.

Unfortunately, Chrome creates huge PDFs. In my testing on this page of my blog, the file size difference was astounding:

  • Chrome-generated PDF: 11.8 MB
  • Acrobat-generated PDF: 953K

On some web pages, Chrome also rasterizes the text creating image-only PDFs. This was always the case in previous versions of Chrome, but it appears to be fixed in the Chrome version I tested (15.0.874.121 m).

If you have Acrobat installed, you can instead print a compact 'electronic' PDF with searchable text.

Here’s how:

  1. In Chrome, go to the web page you want to print
  2. Type CTRL-P to open the Chrome print preview window
  3. I the lower left corner of the window, click 'Print using system dialog'
  4. In the Print window, choose the AdobePDF print driver, then click the Print button.

What’s the difference?

I’ve highlighted the differences below, but in a nutshell:

  • The Chrome PDF is more than ten times bigger
  • The Chrome PDF isn’t searchable
  • You can’t select text in the Chome-generated PDF
  • View quality is impacted

Pdf Reader For Mac

Chrome Page printed with Acrobat
953K
File Preview at 400%