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Channel: PDF reader – Next of Windows

Tools That We Like – Foxit Reader a Lightweight PDF Reader

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FOXIT READER is a light weight PDF reader, only around 5 MB, and yet it provide more feature then Adobe Reader. I just tried it out the other day and I love it, can totally replace my Adobe Reader.

Once you download and installed the application you will notice the install process is lighting fast. Moreover, the speed open any PDF document is much faster than Adobe Reader. This is evident when you have a large PDF documents.

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An experiment you can do it yourself. Adobe Reader opening a 35 MB e-book took around 20-30 seconds to complete. With Foxit Reader it opened instantly.

Some of the additional function it provide that I found very useful:

The ability to highlight text

hightlight

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The ability to add comments

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The ability to view text only (pure text with no format)

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before

Before with format

after

after without format

The only minor problem I ran into with this software is that it opens up the new documents in a new tab, so you can’t preview all your open PDF documents like you do with Adobe Reader in Windows 7/Vista mouse hover.

But regardless everything else, simply for normal reading, the speed it brings is enough to convince me to switch to this as my default PDF reader. 🙂

Try it out yourself, but keep in mind that the free version will leave evaluation water mark when you making additional comments etc.

You can download Foxit Reader here

Update: as one of our twitter follower points out you can go to the Preference (Ctrl + K) and enable “Allow Multiple Instances” and uncheck “Tabbed documents” to make it behave exactly like Adobe PDF reader with the preview thumbnail in the taskbar.

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Download Nitro PDF Reader On Windows 7, Premium Feature Free Software

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Are you still using Adobe PDF reader? If so, you should seriously take consideration of trying some other great alternatives. We’ve covered Foxit Reader before, and today we are going to introduce something that you’ve never seen before.

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Nitro PDF reader is the first of its kind that build specifically for the modern Windows OS. It comes with the Windows Ribbon UI, just like what you normally see in Office 2007/2010 or other new Windows native applications such as Paint and Wordpad.

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Nitro PDF reader is not only a standalone PDF reader, but also a PDF creator in some sort that creates PDF files on the fly. You can create new PDF documents simply by dragging any format of the file you want to covert and dropping them onto the Nitro PDF reader icon.

You can also print any documents to PDF via a fake printer drive from other applications.

Here are some more nice neat features from this version of software. Check it out.

Download the Nitro PDF Reader

How To Change Default PDF Viewer in Chrome and Firefox

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Up until recently I found no need to change the default PDF Viewer in Chrome or Firefox. The default PDF Viewer can render pretty much all the PDF out there except … interactive PDF forms. With that, you need adobe PDF reader to view them and save those fillable PDF forms. Chrome and Firefox has already implemented it’s own PDF render engine within the browser,  hence, such render does not support adobe’s special interactive PDFs.

You can change the default build-in PDF viewer in Chrome or Firefox. Here is how,

Change Default PDF Viewer in Chrome

Head to chrome://plugins/ in Chrome, this will bring up the plugins page. Scroll down a little you will find Chrome PDF Viewer click disable to disable the build-in PDF render in Chrome. Also be sure to make sure Adobe Reader is enabled, or else you will have no plugin to view PDF documents in Chrome.

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Change Default PDF Viewer in FireFox

In Firefox, you can change the default PDF render under Options > Applications > scroll down at the very bottom. Find Portable Document Format (PDF) and change the Action tab to “Use Adobe Acrobat” or “Use Adobe Reader” whatever you have installed to view the PDF. Click OK when done.

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What about IE ?

Well the good news is that, IE doesn’t have a build-in PDF render, it uses Adobe’s PDF reader instead.

The Verdict

Here is the dilemma, Yes, those build-in PDF renders are quicker and faster in opening PDFs in those browser. But they can do better to improve and including more format support or to build a automatic fall-back option, if the build-in browser’s PDF render can’t open the file properly, then use Adobe’s render. This way, we get the best of both when viewing PDFs in Chrome and Firefox.

Why Adobe Illustrator Open Any File As White Blank Canvas

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Adobe Illustrator is a vector file editor, supports various type of vector file formats. One of the most common vector formats it supports is .PDF. Depends on the content inside PDF file, you can open it in Adobe Illustrator and see the ‘source’ of the content in vector shapes.

A designer can save the raw content in .pdf via Illustrator, and a regular pdf viewer would only see the visible canvas where as with Illustrator you are able to see content outside the visible space. Som time, when opening a .pdf file, Adobe Illustrator would show a blank white canvas, even though you can clearly see from the side layers or other thumbnails the file renders but not visible.

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If this happens to you, chances are your GPU aren’t compatible with the version of Adobe Illustrator. Go to Edit > Preferences > GPU Performance. Ignore the message saying “Compatible GPU detected.” and uncheck “GPU Performance“.

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You might need to restart Adobe Illustrator. Now try to open the .pdf file again in Illustrator with GPU performance disabled, it should load the file properly now.

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Give this a try if you too experience such problem with your .ai or .pdf files.

Top 3 FREE PDF Merge, Split, Reorder Tools on Windows

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PDF documents and its viewer are ubiquitous those days. All major web browsers (like Chrome, Edge, and Firefox) can render PDF file, not to mention the dedicated Adobe PDF reader. That said, PDF editors for Windows are actually far and few in between. If there ever is a need to manipulate PDF documents, all the readers we mentioned above are unable to perform such task. Some of the most common tasks you might need are Merge, Split and Reorder PDF pages. Unless you pay a premium to Adobe for its basic Adobe Acrobat license, it’s difficult to modify a PDF file.

Here are three FREE tools alternative to Adobe Acrobat, for Windows that allows you to do some, if not all of the basic operations such as Merge, Split and Reorder PDF documents.

#1PDFsam Basic – PDF Split and Merge Basic Edition

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PDFsam basic offers Merge, Split and Extract. Not necessary have the reorder feature out of the box, but given you can extract and merge it is possible to perform reorder manually. One thing to note is PDFsam requires Java runtime. If you have a strong opinion against using Java based apps and would like to have your system not depend on JRE then this might not be the choice for you. Apart from JRE as a prerequisite, PDFsam basic does what it promises. There are also feature such as Split by size might be useful for large PDF documents to create equal size partial files for easy share. Over all, PDFsam basic does what it promises to do for free. Well polished UI that’s based on Java.

#2 PDF Shaper Free

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PDF Shaper Free is another freeware that allows you to manipulate PDF files. Unlike the previous one, this does not require any additional JRE to run the app. Right off the back, it narrows down the navigation to four basic options around Documents, Content, Pages, and Security. Just like PDFsam, it allows you to Merge multiple PDF files into a single PDF, as well as split PDF file into a smaller size by page numbers.

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There are more features under Pages for page orientation, extract selected pages into a separate PDF file, as well as adding watermark or remove selected pages in a given PDF. The features we see here already exceeds some of the basic features other tools have to offer. So, if you are looking for more in-depth PDF editing, be sure to remember to check out all the features PDF Shaper has to offer in the free edition before pulling out your wallet for Adobe Acrobat.

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All of the tools mentioned here so far does not offer a visual editing experience. Unlike macOS’s Preview, you cannot make changes in the tool visually as you browsing through the documents. That means you need to know exactly which page you want to strip away or start merge when using this tool. This also means that, in order to properly reorder any page, you need to split and merge them manually. That said, PDF Shaper Free does have a preview function to see what your PDF would look like before proceeding. Simply click the “Preview” icon (4th from left) to see how a merged PDF would look like.

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Lastly, it also offers to create password protected PDF and unlock password protected PDF files. It also strips away all the metadata, for example, it can remove or update the author, created dates etc. The last “Sign” feature is not about PDF document signature, it’s about digital signing with private keys in PFX file format. Do not get confused with user signature signing in a PDF document.

#3 7-PDF Split & Merge

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Last but not least, we have another tool that does the basic merge and split. 7-PDF Split & Merge offers what most of the above two tools but with out-dated UI. Once you figure out which button to click, the tool does the job. We aren’t going down to the rabbit hole by reviewing how the UX could improve, but there is an advantage in laying out all possible UI in one presentation. At a glance, a user can quickly figure out what are all the options in Split and Merge your PDF.

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Verdict

PDF Shaper Free is arguably the winner of the three. It has more features than other two free versions. Although it is nowhere compared to Preview, the free out of box tool on Mac, it does get the job done at the end of the day. And that is all it matters.

Adobe PDF Tip: How To Print Large Posters Across Multiple Pages

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A colleague of mine asked me the other day how to print a large document properly. It’s a one-page PDF file that requires a 200 inches long paper to print all, like below in full-page view.

To properly print the document, it has to be split across multiple sheets of paper. Luckily, Adobe already has already got this covered. It’s the same process when you need to print a large format document, such as a poster or banner.

Here is how to print it.

Go to Files > Print.

In the Print dialog box, click Poster button in the Page Sizing & Handling section.

From there, apply some of the options described below:

  • Tile Scale – to scale the pages smaller or larger as you wish.
  • Overlap – to determine the amount each tile overlaps the adjacent tiles. Giving some overlaps will let you put all pages together easier later on.
  • Cut marks – to add guide marks to each page to help you trim the overlap.
  • Labels – to add the filename and page number on each separate page.
  • Tile only large pages – useful when printing a mixed document that has both regular and large pages.

Click the Print button once all set.

The feature is also called Tiling in older versions. If you are still using Adobe PDF 9 or earlier, you may not see this feature available in the Print option.





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