Tag Archives: Adobe

Small & Fast Adobe Acrobat Alternative for Windows

If you regularly use Adobe Acrobat Reader on Windows then I am sure you have come across the problem that certain documents load and display unacceptably slow, even on a fast dual or quad core CPU and on machines with ample memory. In particular, I am talking about quickly scrolling through a graphics or photo intensive file in continuous display mode. I want to be able to grab the scroll-bar, or alternatively, use my mouse wheel to very quickly scan through the whole document, and frequently, Acrobat halts briefly while (presumably) buffering the content on the next few pages. Why is that? I don’t know, I find it exceptionally frustrating that a program made by the company who set the standard is not able to offer good performance and recent hardware.

Now, one might be inclined to blame the hardware, alas, that’s not the case. Continue reading

Acrobat Side-by-side Comparison Got Sidestepped

One of the most useful features in Adobe Acrobat 5.0 that I used first as a student and then later even more at work was its ability to compare two documents side-by-side and mark all the differences. It is the only program I know to date that enables one to do this. I used it frequently to compare all sorts of files, usually either MS-Word documents or MS-Excel sheets. While this does involve the extra step of creating PDFs, it works beautifully in most cases. Continue reading