I recently got a new laptop and have been keen to keep it as bloat-free as possible. The other day I needed to view a PDF for the first time and decided that I really didn’t want to sacrifice 335MB of my nice shiny SSD to Adobe Reader. I figured there had to be a leaner, meaner way of opening PDFs (you’d think Windows would support it natively by now) so I hunted around and came across the open source Sunatra PDF.
Weighing in at under 1.7MB it consists of a single EXE file with no installer required (though one is available if desired). I was able to download it via my mobile and get the PDF up within no time at all – bliss! I’m now going to stick it in my Dropbox folder and on my USB drive so I always have it with me.
If you need pixel-perfect precision then perhaps this isn’t your thing – its rendering isn’t always perfect and doesn’t have as many features as Adobe Reader as you’d expect. But if you just need to view the contents of a PDF and don’t really care about the odd glitch here and there then it’s definitely worth a try.
2 Comments
Foxit pdf reader is the standard non-standard choice.
Aware of Foxit but I think that still requires an installer? I was looking for super-slim!