PDF Creation, Editing, and Viewing

It seems that with each passing year, the value of PDF is increasing. It is the common document format that allows one to perfectly view a document on a wide variety of computing platforms, from PCs and Macs to tablets and mobile phones. In recent years, though, Adobe Reader has been plagued with issues. Actually, I’ve been fortunate enough to have never encountered those issues, but Adobe sends out updates from time-to-time wherein they patch some security vulnerability. So, there are definitely issues.

Adobe’s most recent update to their Windows version of Reader did present me with a problem, though: I could not open two PDF documents at the same time. It did not matter what I did, it was impossible to open a second document.

So, I went looking for an alternative PDF viewer for my PC. I decided to give Foxit a try. I had heard about Foxit a few years ago, but did not really know how well it compared to Adobe. I was impressed right away. It seemed to load quickly, render quickly, scroll quickly, and I could not find a document that presented rendering issues. (Yeah, that is the one ugly truth about PDF. It’s universally available, but largely because Adobe Reader is universally available. In my experience, other software does not always consistently render PDF documents properly.)

I’ve been using Foxit every day now for a few weeks. It’s a really great PDF viewer. So far, I have not found a single instance where it failed to properly render a PDF document.