I have never been a fan of Adobe Acrobat Reader. It constantly needs updating, runs slowly and locks up in IE. So I when I came across Foxit Reader from Foxit Software, I wanted to try it as an alternative. For this week’s FreewareFrenzy, I will take a look at Foxit Reader 1.3 Build 1522. Let’s see if it stacks up to the ever present Adobe Acrobat.

Installation is simple, and it does include options for a quick launch, desktop icon or program menu entry. After it launched, I set Foxit to be my default PDF reader program

When I was online, Adobe would always slow to a crawl if I moved too quickly through a document that was still loading. Clicking my browser’s Back button would also be a dicey affair, with frequent freezes. With Foxit, I saw a noticeable improvement in speed and reliability on the web. Opening documents within the browser was a breeze, loading fast and never locking up. No Back button issues to be found.

I did find an interesting bug which may affect others who try Foxit Reader. I opened a PDF file of newspaper article scans for a class I took. It is worth noting that the articles were from the Wall Street Journal, and contained only English characters. Foxit produced an error informing me that it needed a separate .BIN file to load a document with Chinese or Korean characters. The error included a link to the file on Foxit’s website. I closed the error and looked at the document. Large portions were completely blank. Clearly I needed help, even though the foreign characters were not an issue.

I downloaded the .BIN file and placed it in the Foxit Program folder. When I reopened Foxit, the error appeared again, but if I closed it, there were no longer blank areas. Progress, I thought. However, the text was extremely blurry. That blur should not exist because Adobe reader had no problems displaying the articles properly. I started to worry that Foxit was a dud, a write-off. But I persevered. (Shows how much I wanted to be rid of Adobe).

I re-visited the Foxit website, and found their support forums. Sue enough there was a thread about this very error. In the thread a person posted that the error itself was wrong, and that Foxit Reader needed a different file. A moderator posted the required .DLL file and after downloading it and unzipping it to the Foxit Program folder, all was well. No error message and the text was perfectly readable.

So now that Foxit is ready to go, let’s compare it to Adobe reader. I already mentioned the noticeable improvement online, but of course, we don’t always read PDFs online. The stand-alone reader needs to be functional. Simply put, Foxit has everything you need to work with PDFs, essentially equal to Adobe Acrobat. The usual array of View, Zoom and Selection options are present. You can customize toolbars, change layouts, cascade windows and print your documents. The Custom Preferences Menu is rather sparse, but what more does a PDF reader really need? The help is limited to Foxit’s website and forums, but once I solved my initial problem, I had no problems with Foxit Reader.

So there you have it for this week. If you have ever had issues with Adobe Acrobat and wished there was alternative, here it is. While the program may have included a bug, I was easily able to fix it, and move on. Also, the bug is documented, so a fixed build is sure to be coming. Foxit Reader is a small application, just over 1MB to download. Compare that to the 28MB for Adobe’s product. Check it out here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php