Adobe Reader Alternatives: No Clear Winner

Perfect PDF Reader 5

soft Xpansion’s Perfect PDF Reader 5 is not in the “small and fast” category of reader by any means. The installer requires the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package, making the total product weigh in at 268MB. That’s a lot for a PDF viewer-much more than Adobe 9 (188MB on the same computer)-and I caught Perfect PDF Reader 5 at one point using well over 100MB of RAM.

For all that heft, you get a program with that Office 2007 look. It really does have a great interface for reading PDFs. If you just want to breeze through, maybe select some text and print, Perfect PDF Reader is a good way to do it.

For reasons unclear, Perfect PDF Reader 5 includes some tools, like font enumeration, that are more appropriate for a PDF editor than for a reader. It also has what appears to be well-designed tools for use of digital signatures, is more straightforward than any of the other readers tested and, like PDF-XCHANGE, provides a button to view the document in Adobe Reader.

I have to admit that I’m a little tempted by Perfect PDF Reader 5, but it’s hard to argue for the app in comparison to Adobe Reader.

Conclusion

The Adobe Reader and Acrobat programs have taken many lumps when it comes to security. Each alternative that eWEEK Labs tested had something going for it, but none proved compelling enough to serve as an ongoing alternative to Reader.