You Can View PDF Without Adobe

I found years ago that Adobe's Acrobat reader is a resource hog. To avoid this and view pdf without Adobe, you've just got to get another reader. Here are a few to choose from.

My wife has a laptop (a Windows 7 box) provided by her employer.  Her personal "internetting" is done on either the Android tablet I got her for Christmas, her Blackberry (I think only for Facebook) or on a computer at the house.  The laptop, as far as I know, goes on the State's website (I don't think I can rant about that expensive mess without getting her in trouble) and maybe her employer's.  It checks her email.  As far as I know, that's all the laptop does online.

Yesterday she called me in a panic from the house.  She couldn't open a pdf file.  I said "go grab–" and she said she couldn't.  I forget.  The software police her agency hired don't want employees installing stuff willy-nilly.  It's a good policy to have I guess, unless the tools THEY provide suck.  Adobe Acrobat is one such tool in my book.

Over the years I've found a few different pdf readers.  So far, the smoothest running one that I've found for Windows is Sumatra.  It's pretty simple to run, doesn't make much of a footprint on the system, and allows you view pdf files without using Adobe products.

Every once in a while I'll run across a PDF file that doesn't look right, and in those instances I'll have to use something else.  Evince is something I'm used to using (since it was primarily written to be used on a Linux desktop) and there's a Windows port of it that works well.  To my knowledge, there's only one outfit I've gotten pdfs from that wouldn't open in Sumatra, and I'm guessing that the problem is their ERP writing wonky pdf files.

If you don't like either of these, there's always pdfreaders.org, which has a list of others.