I learned about the Foxit PDF Reader from Scott Hanselman's blog. I know a number of people who have issues with Adobe Reader - it's big (and gets bigger with each new release). It adds a number of startup processes to your system. And it can create conflicts with other software. So, an alternative is welcome.
Enter the Foxit PDF Reader - it's free, lightweight (less than 1 MB download), and available for both all flavors of Windows from 95 to XP. It provides search, copy-and-paste of text from a PDF, and the ability to type new text into a PDF which is great for completing forms.
1. I tried Foxit a few months back and experienced a weird problem: the program would close, or shut down, on me all by itself. I'd have a pdf open, be reading it, and...poof!...it would just disappear. I'd re-launch the program, re-open my PDF, and within a few minutes it would disappear, again. And, it wasn't any particular PDF that caused this behavior.
That, and the fact that it doesn't handle DRM'd PDFs (all the ebooks I buy at Amazon are PDFs), prompted me to stick with Acrobat 7.0. I've never really had a problem with Acrobat other than the fact that it gets very sluggish if I have several PDFs open at the same time.
Posted at 5:59PM on Dec 31st 2005 by Scott