Wednesday, 2 August 2017

7 Free, cross-platform PDF Readers

PDF is arguably one of the most popular formats for sharing documents. One of the reasons is that the PDF specification is freely available, meaning that anyone can develop an application to read and create PDF documents that will display equally well everywhere.

Apart from Adobe Reader, which has not been supported on Linux for some years, there are a number of free PDF reader apps. Best of all, the following list of apps is cross-platform (meaning you can run them on Windows, Mac or Linux).

1. Evince

The first application on our list is Evince, which is the default GNOME PDF viewer and is therefore well-maintained.

Apart from PDFs, Evince can open a number of formats: Postscript, djvu, tiff, dvi, XPS as well as a number of comic book formas (cbr,cbz,cb7 and cbt).


Home Page: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince

2. Mozilla Firefox (PDF.js)

If you have Mozilla Firefox installed, you already have a PDF reader on your computer. Simply drag a document from your desktop into a Firefox window, and it will load the PDF reader. It will also show PDF documents you browse to from the web.

Firefox's built-in PDF viewer uses a Javascript library called PDF.js. It sports all the usual features, including thumbnails of pages, document outline, viewing attachments and reading in full-screen view.


3. Foxit Reader

Foxit Software offers a whole suite of software for editing and managing PDFs for businesses, including a free PDF reader.

Of all the PDF readers featured here, it is probably the most feature-ful, boasting things like comments, signing, support for forms and tabbed browsing.


Home Page: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/

4. Google Chrome

Like Firefox, Chrome also has its own built-in browser. This one, however, is built on a proprietary library. As with Firefox, Chrome will open PDF documents which you browse to on the web and you can also open documents by dragging them from your desktop to a Chrome window.

Unlike Firefox's built-in reader though, it does support forms.


5. MuPDF

MuPDF is a library and PDF Viewer. The viewer is a completely bare-bones application that offers no toolbar and which you can open from the command line, perhaps making it useful for integration with other apps. It is also available as an Android app.

It is small and fast, and includes support for a number of formats, including PDF, XPS, OpenXPS, CBZ, EPUB, and FictionBook 2.


Home Page: https://mupdf.com/

6. Utopia Documents

Utopia Documents is a polished, pretty-looking, Qt-based application with a library manager amongst other things with which you can sort and store documents. It has extra features related to research, like searching for references online and providing citations of documents.


7. Qoppa PDF Studio Viewer

The last one on our list is PDF Studio Viewer, a proprietary, Java-based app with a free reader. The Professional, paid-for version allows you to edit PDF documents. At a download exceeding 100MB and a 400+MB installation footprint, it's definitely one of the heavyweights. For that, it does pack some extra features, including the ability to fill forms (although, for some reason, fields are initially filled with a strange character as seen here).


Conclusion

There is certainly no shortage of PDF viewers available and, best of all, there are many free options out there that will run equally well on Windows and Linux. As mentioned here, browsers like Firefox and Chrome will do equally well in a pinch.

If you need to create PDF documents, even PDF forms, you can use the open source (and free) LibreOffice for this task as an alternative to expensive office software like Microsoft Office.

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