Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Tabbed PDF Viewing Arrives in Foxit Reader



I often have to have multiple PDF files open for work I'm doing at school. I just downloaded the latest version of Foxit Reader and the tabbed viewing works like a charm:
I won't speak for the group, but I find Adobe Acrobat Reader a necessary evil. It seems like when I haven't installed it, people send me PDFs up the ying-yang. And of course, when I do carry it around on my UMPC, it's taking up space for no good reason. It's as if the installation alone is a PDF-repellant somehow.

Foxit Reader might be the best compromise I can think of. The download is about a tenth of the size of the full blown Reader from Acrobat, which is useful for devices with limited storage. For the one day of the year that I get multiple PDF files sent to me, the newest version offers tabbed viewing for even more efficiency. Just like the original, it's free for the downloading on the PC of your choice.
Just hit Ctrl-Tab (or Ctrl-Shift-Tab) to switch between tabs. It's great if you have to work with multiple PDF fiiles. Not only that, but it's much, much faster than Adobe Acrobat too.

P.S. -- After using this a little more, I found a couple of annoyances in how the program functions:

1) The order it scrolls through tabs using keyboard navigation does not correspond to the order in which the tabs are displayed.

2) It should let you drag and drop tabs so you can rearrange the order of them (like in Firefox).

Still, the tabs are a nice feature and a wonderful improvement over Adobe Acrobat. Neither of these issues should matter if you're only working with only two files.

1 comment:

Mishka said...

Oh thats so great.. I have to try this one out. was just blog hunting when i came across this.. really cool... blog. Love it!!! Hope we r blog buddies now.. hahaha yay!! good job here.. love it