Adobe Acrobat Reader could stand to drop 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, recognition is commonly 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 application used to read .PDF files. PDF ( Portable Document Format ) is the file format created by Adobe Systems for the exchange of documents. Independent of the usual 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 made by Adobe Systems - was the the only application that one could use to view a PDF file. A little over a year ago, Adobe released the format as an open format, making it possible to read the file with other solutions. Acrobat Reader, like all popular applications that suffer with the already mentioned complacency, saw its evolution stunted by a lack of attention given to performance. Though basically used for just viewing files, its bloat is obvious, the application consuming approximately 30MB of space. While Acrobat Reader has features that haven't yet been adopted by competing software, there are a number of alternatives that offer its core functionality without the excess baggage. One option is Evince. Evince is prominent for its simplicity, its name accompanied by a tagline that reads, "Simply a document viewer." Thats 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 like it is a slideshow. In this mode, each page is treated as a slide. Originally written for use with Linux, there is a Windows version that offers the same features. Another great alternative is SumatraPDF. For people 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 specific tool for the functions that are most employed by those viewing a PDF : open, page-jump, search. Though its functionality is limited to just the core tasks we associate with Acrobat Reader, it moves at an impressive speed, with a minimalistic design that spares you the unnecessary 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've 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 buy the Foxit Reader Pro Pack. The chief feature of the Pro Pack is the facility to edit your PDF files. In the case of Acrobat Reader, this is but one out of many examples where you will find that the most popular software isn't necessarily the optimum solution. Acrobat Reader is definitely no slouch, coming from the company that invented the PDF format, but there's no denying that it can stand to lose lots of the weight that slows the current version down. Until that is done, the alternatives mentioned above should be more than enough to satisfy your wants where viewing PDF files are concerned.

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