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View PDF Documents Without Installing Software

Posted Sep 9, 2008 by Rich Menga  

image Recently I had to reinstall Windows XP on my laptop and had to view a PDF but didn’t feel like installing the Adobe software. As most people know, the PDF viewer from Adobe is huge, clunky in operation and a huge memory sucker. Furthermore the modern variant of the software does that "view inside the browser" crapola which is extremely annoying.

Note before continuing: Yes I know I could have downloaded and used the Foxit Reader, but all I wanted to do was view a PDF with no fuss, no muss.

I thought to myself "There must be some way to view a PDF online without installing any software."

The first option is to use Google Docs. But they only allow a maximum filesize of 500k. Boooooo.. not good. They offer 7 gigs of e-mail storage but won’t load a document over 500k in Google Docs? Ridiculous.

Then I finally found what I was looking for. It’s simply titled Online viewer for PDF, PostScript and Word. NO software to be installed. NO registration required. Upload the file (or enter the URL of where it is) and you’re good to go.

To note: Yes it looks a bit "ugly", but who cares? You can load PDFs and read them and that’s the whole point.

I hope that site stays online forever. It’s simple and lightning fast - the way it should be. :-)

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