Open Source Alternatives
While I worked for a company, I took for granted the ability to purchase and use products (and sevices) such as Adobe Acrobat, GotoMeeting and Microsoft Office. As a new entrepreneur, there are plenty of things that are competing for my limited funds and I’m always on the lookout for free or low-cost alternatives that provide similar benefits. This is the first in a series of blog posts that will highlight my favorite open-source and commerical alternatives.
Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is everywhere. In a few short years (15 years to be exact), it has become the de facto standard for displaying documents across platforms. Yes, Adobe Reader is free to download and use. You may be asking yourself, “OK… if Adobe Reader is free, how can there be a better alternative?” Well, there are several alternatives. My favorite is one called FoxIt Reader for Windows.
Why Foxit Reader? First, the basic version is free. The basic version allows you to view and annotate PDF documents. It even allows you to convert an entire PDF document to a text file. For the vast majority of people, the basic version is more than sufficient. All I want to do is view and print PDF documents. Foxit does offer four add-ons which I’ll talk about later on in the article.
Second, Foxit Reader is small. It’s really small and really fast. How small? Well according to the Adobe web site, the download for the most recent version of Adobe Reader is 33.5MB. Now granted, 33.5MB in this age of ubiquitous high-speed internet access and terabytes of storage seems like a small amount, and it is. By comparison, Foxit Reader is a svelte 2.5MB. Why does this matter? Well, it matters because I’m tired of downloading bloated software that contain features that I just don’t use.
Lastly, Foxit Reader is super fast. Instead of being bombarded with a splash screen with the names of people that developer the product or a list of modules that are being loaded, Foxit Reader simply loads the document you’re looking at. That’s it. Plain and simple.
So, why use Foxit Reader? Three reasons. It’s free. It’s small. It’s fast.
