Free pdf file reader

In message , Mayayana
writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| If you can't edit or add with it, what restrictions did you remove, that
| made any actual difference? (Just curious.)

PDF format includes the ability to add restrictions
to such things as extracting text. (I don't remember the
other possible restrictions offhand. I think there are
3 or 4 of them.) It also allows for encryption. I can't

(Now you mention it, I think one concerns printing.)

bypass encryption, but the file "permissions" settings
are just flags. That is, they only exist if the reader
software checks for them. If I have a PDF I want to
read then I usually prefer to extract the text and read
it in Notepad. So I just commented out the restriction
check in the Sumatra code and recompiled. (I also
removed that garish yellow in the main window.) I

You wouldn't care to share your recompiled version, would you?

haven't done it for a recent version, though. It's too
much trouble. The latest version requires Visual Studio
2015. There's a free version of that, which would be
adequate, but Microsoft now requires people to sign
up and allow a web install in order to get it. They want
to sell their cloud nonsense and datamine potential
customers. That's all just too creepy for my taste.

Mine too.

Without a clean offline installer I don't want to use
their tools.

Such things are getting rarer )-:.

--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's
the part that I do understand." - Mark Twain

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Mayayana
writes:
"Mike Tomlinson" wrote

| SumatraPDF is light, fast and can also display ebooks (.epubs).

Sumatra is nice. I use it for all reading and
even recompiled it at one point to bypass
any PDF file restrictions that might be set,
but Sumatra *does not* edit fields or add
comments.


If you can't edit or add with it, what restrictions did you remove, that
made any actual difference? (Just curious.)

There is a much more powerful way to prevent copying
of text via copy/paste.

There are desktop publishing tools, which change
the font table, such that the screen reads correctly,
but an attempt to copy/paste gets the wrong characters.
Even if you defeat the copy protection bit, the modified
tables prevent easy copying.

http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/corner/Obfuscated_PDF

I defeated this on a sample document, but it took me two
weeks. When I was finished, the sample doc looked pretty
much like the original, only the copy/paste was restored
to "normal". It took a handful of scripts to undo the
translations, and it amounts to OCR-by-hand in a sense.
(You figure out what the corrected font table should
look like, and apply it to the document.)

If you need "basic cleaning" on a PDF, try mupdf.

MuPDF is hosted on the same site as GhostScript.

http://ghostscript.com/download/

http://mupdf.com/downloads/mupdf-1.9a-windows.zip

mupdf-gl can view PDF files.
mutool.exe is useful for command line cleaning.

usage: mutool command [options]
draw -- convert document
run -- run javascript
clean -- rewrite pdf file
extract -- extract font and image resources
info -- show information about pdf resources
pages -- show information about pdf pages
poster -- split large page into many tiles
show -- show internal pdf objects
create -- create pdf document
merge -- merge pages from multiple pdf sources into a new pdf

For example:

mutool clean annoying_Intel_doc.pdf pleasant_to_use_Intel_doc.pdf

Paul

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| You wouldn't care to share your recompiled version, would you?
|
Sure. Is that email valid? If not you can write
to me at my website, as long as it's not gmail,
hotmail, yahoo, etc.

I'll have to get it together. I think the version I
have is 2.1.1. The current is 3.1.2, but I don't know
of any notable differences. Actually I've avoided
the newer versions because they've added javascript
support and who-knows-what-else. For me the
appeal of Sumatra is small, fast and safe.

I think I need to send you the code changes
to satisfy the GPL, though if I remember correctly,
it's only one DLL that needs to change. But I'll
figure that out, come up with a ZIP, and send
it to you. I'd post it on my site but I don't want
to directly conflict with the Sumatra author. For
unknown reasons he chose to respect PDF
restrictions, so it seems rude to just post a
non-hobbled version of his work.

In message , Mayayana
writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| You wouldn't care to share your recompiled version, would you?
|
Sure. Is that email valid? If not you can write

Yes; has been for (I think) a couple of decades, though not sure if
Vodafone are going to finally kill it next year!

to me at my website, as long as it's not gmail,
hotmail, yahoo, etc.

Do you block those? Although I sympathise, I do have a _few_ friends who
have such an email.

I'll have to get it together. I think the version I
have is 2.1.1. The current is 3.1.2, but I don't know
of any notable differences. Actually I've avoided
the newer versions because they've added javascript
support and who-knows-what-else. For me the
appeal of Sumatra is small, fast and safe.

Why I liked Foxit initially.

I think I need to send you the code changes
to satisfy the GPL, though if I remember correctly,
it's only one DLL that needs to change. But I'll
figure that out, come up with a ZIP, and send
it to you. I'd post it on my site but I don't want
to directly conflict with the Sumatra author. For
unknown reasons he chose to respect PDF
restrictions, so it seems rude to just post a
non-hobbled version of his work.

Understood.

--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

The breathtaking wonders of nature revealed to the soothing tones of Sir David
Attenborough. Life doesn't get much better than that.
- Ben Preston, Radio Times editor (2016/11/26-12/2)

Asger Joergensen wrote:

Walter E. wrote:

I am looking for a free pdf reader with the ability to fill in pdf
forms that I can download and then fill in?

Adope Acrobat Reader, can do what you want, but it's a huge monster.
I have it installed for formfilling and special printing, but for daily
viewing of PDF files I use SumatraPDF very fast, light veight and free.

So which one did you mean to mention? Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader?
Not the same product. Adobe Acrobat can edit the PDF but it is payware.
Adobe Reader is freeware (per the OP's request) but cannot edit the PDF;
however, Adobe Reader can *annotate* a PDF (add a layer). See:

http://blogs.adobe.com/dmcmahon/2011...-adobe-reader/
^^^^^^^^^^
\___ article's date

This is the same annotation feature that was previously available in
non-Adobe PDF viewers. I remember having annotation in PDF-Xchange
Viewer long before it showed up in Adobe Reader.

While Adobe Reader has a bigger footprint than non-Adobe PDF viewers, it
does have a sandbox missing from the others. The sandboxing adds to the
memory footprint of Adobe Reader. However, the Adobe sandbox can
interfere with other sandboxes, like the ones used by several anti-virus
programs in which they run an as-yet-unknown program. You have to
decide which sandbox to use. Likely you'll want to keep the AV's
sandbox (to apply against as-yet-unknown programs) and turn off
Protected Mode in Adobe Reader. Alas, AVs won't see a .pdf as an
exectuable file despite it can carry options to run a command on load
and carry an executable payload. So some users disable sandboxing in
their AV for Adobe Reader (exclude it from getting sandboxed by the AV)
and instead use the sandbox in Adobe Reader. For more info about Adobe
Reader's sandbox, see:

https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/ac...ectedmode.html

In PDF-Xchange Viewer (and took longer to show up in the later
PDF-Xchange Editor replacement), I can disable Javascript (which means
some interactive PDFs won't display correctly, like those that validate
input for a field type), opening a document (which could be an
executable file) on loading a PDF, and opening an attachment (which
could be executable) on loading a PDF. Eventually Adobe added those
security features to Reader, too, but it took a long time to show up.
Some non-Adobe PDF viewers don't support Javascript, open doc on load,
and open attachment on load so the exclusion of those features means
they are already more secure (no user-configurable options) but that
also means no choice to the user.

A problem with many non-Adobe PDF viewers is that they do not view all
PDF format versions, especially the old ones. I've encountered PDFs
that I could not view in PDF-Xchange Viewer (which pre-dated PDF-XChange
Editor) but could view in Adobe Reader. Including support for the old
PDF formats also accounts for the larger disk and memory footprints of
Adobe Reader. Nowadays it is rare that I get impacted by a PDF that
uses a format version prior to version 1.5. For PDF versions, see:

https://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/version

Paul in Houston TX wrote:

Walter E. wrote:
I am looking for a free pdf reader with the ability to fill in pdf forms that I can
download and then fill in?

Thanks for any recommendation

Windows 7 64 bit

Almost any of them can do that. Try several and use the one you like.
I use both Foxit and PDF-Xchange.
They are about 25 megs compared to Adobe's 250 megs.

Back in Jan 2013 when I last tested Adobe Reader to compare against
PDF-Xchange Viewer (not their later Editor product), the memory
footprints that I got for the two we

PDFXchange Viewer - 17 MB
Adobe Reader - 29 MB

Granted that the memory footprints may have gone up some since those
versions that I tested but I doubt an increase of 8MB (47%) by
PDF-Xchange Viewer (perhaps caused by moving to PDF-Xchange Editor)
would be matched by a 229MB (762%) increase in Adobe Reader.

To know the real numbers instead of making extravagant guesses, do you
actually have Adobe Reader and PDF-Xchange Editor both installed to see
how big is their base memory footprint? Load only the program (no PDF
file) for each to see the baseline memory footprint.

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote


| Do you block those? Although I sympathise, I do have a _few_ friends who
| have such an email.

I have a lot of them. I have to allow it for
personal email and work, but I avoid writing
more than necessary. For the website I don't
have to allow it, so I don't. Most people who write
are writing for some kind of help, so I figure it's
not too much to ask that they write via real email.

On Sun, 18 Dec 2016 17:50:11 -0500, Stan Brown wrote:

On Sun, 18 Dec 2016 13:48:21 -0600, VanguardLH wrote:
"Walter E." wrote:

I am looking for a free pdf reader with the ability to fill in pdf forms
that I can download and then fill in?

Windows 7 64 bit

I would think and PDF viewer that says it has annotation would fit your
criteria. I use PDF-Xchange Editor but there are others than can do
annotation.

I do too. It's just fine at filling in the US income tax forms, but
it fails to fill in the New York State forms. (Or at least it did ten
months ago, when I did my 2015 taxes.)

I got back at 'em -- I printed the blank forms and filled 'em in with
a felt-tip pen!

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...

On Mon, 19 Dec 2016 15:06:19 -0600, VanguardLH wrote:
Asger Joergensen wrote:

[quoted text muted]

Adope Acrobat Reader, can do what you want, but it's a huge monster.
I have it installed for formfilling and special printing, but for daily
viewing of PDF files I use SumatraPDF very fast, light veight and free.

So which one did you mean to mention? Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader?


Reader is a huge monster, though perhaps not so huge as Acrobat. I
got tired of the constant updates every time I booted my computer (or
so it seemed).

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...

"Stan Brown" wrote

| I do too. It's just fine at filling in the US income tax forms, but
| it fails to fill in the New York State forms. (Or at least it did ten
| months ago, when I did my 2015 taxes.)
|
| I got back at 'em -- I printed the blank forms and filled 'em in with
| a felt-tip pen!
|

It's probably not the software but the state. I use
PDFXCV for US forms but MA forms are not designed
to be filled in. Maybe NY is the same. I actually save
them as BMPs, fill them out in PSP, then print them.
It's not as easy as a PDF editor, but not really so hard,
and it saves me making multiple copies.

Stan Brown wrote:

VanguardLH wrote:

Asger Joergensen wrote:

[quoted text muted]

Adope Acrobat Reader, can do what you want, but it's a huge monster.
I have it installed for formfilling and special printing, but for daily
viewing of PDF files I use SumatraPDF very fast, light veight and free.

So which one did you mean to mention? Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader?

Reader is a huge monster, though perhaps not so huge as Acrobat. I
got tired of the constant updates every time I booted my computer (or
so it seemed).

The problem with equating the number of updates and even the number of
CVS vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader against other non-Adobe PDF viewers
is that no one is targeting the non-Adobe PDF viewers to expose their
vulnerabilities. PDF-Xchange Viewer, for example, has a single
vulnerability reported in 2016. This was not an in-the-wild exploit.
Users won't ever know how many there really are in PDXViewer because it
isn't targeted and PDX doesn't report the ones that they find. Their
Editor has had 19 "critical errors" in that product's short lifetime.

If you look at the marketshare of Adobe Reader versus PDF-Xchange
Editor, twould be interesting to see how many exploits there are
weighted to their marketshare. The non-Adobe PDF viewers don't tell you
which were in-the-wild vulnerabilities or potential exploits. You can't
tell how had they are. The only saving grace is that they are rarely or
never targeted. ICBMs target major cities, not some hick towns having a
population of under ten.

I might reinstall Adobe Reader again so check its install-time disk
footprint and its run-time memory footprint compared to PDF-Xchange
Editor. However, I'll have to whitelist the Reader's executable in
Avast to prevent Avast from erroring with its sandbox when Reader is
using its own sandbox. I tried hunting online for an article that might
have already done the disk/memory footprint benchmark but didn't find
one. Sometimes getting just the right elixir of search terms is
required to find related articles. Very often after installation, I
tweak a program, so it could be that I've tweaked Adobe Reader when I
tested that differs from the default setup or other users configured
Adobe Reader to be an bigger memory hog. I keep hearing non-Adobe
Reader users remarking about the huge disk/memory footprint but never
see any actual benchmarks. I have not seen reports of huge memory usage
by Adobe Reader that allowed the product to expire its memory pages
after several minutes or if it refused to relinquish those pages when
another process requested more memory but Reader refuse to cede its
expired pages. I've seen reports by users saying CPU usage was high but
never did they mention the priority of the Reader process or if other
processes would load okay and Reader would throttle back. I have
several products, like backup programs, that will run at lower priority,
throttle back on CPU in deference to another process, or cede unused
expired pages. Someone claims memory usage but not how it was tested or
even gives values from actual testing.

By the way, I have asked PDX-Change if they would add a sandbox to their
PDF Editor. Their PDF Viewer is legacy so no such major change to that
one. I asked for a sandbox feature in their Editor back in June 2014
(https://www.tracker-software.com/for...dbox#p 83393).
As usual with many of their replies, oh yeah, they like the idea and it
might show up in some future version. 2-1/2 years later and still no
sandbox. It took them a long time to add the security options (don't
run program on PDF load, don't load attachment on PDF load) to
PDF-Xchange Editor that had been there for several years prior in
PDF-Xchange Viewer. I asked in July 2014 about the missing security
options in Editor which Editor had already been released 14 months
earlier (and in beta before that). I did not switch from their Viewer
to their Editor until they got around to adding the missing security
options. Until PDF-XChange Editor got the same security options as were
long available in PDF-Xchange, Adobe Reader was more secure (it had
those options plus a sandbox).

Mayayana wrote:

It's probably not the software but the state. I use PDFXCV for US
forms but MA forms are not designed to be filled in. Maybe NY is the
same. I actually save them as BMPs, fill them out in PSP, then print
them. It's not as easy as a PDF editor, but not really so hard, and
it saves me making multiple copies.

Wouldn't the annotate feature in PDFX Viewer/Editor, or any PDF viewer
with annotation, let you do that within the same program?

Hi VanguardLH

VanguardLH wrote:

Asger Joergensen wrote:

Walter E. wrote:

I am looking for a free pdf reader with the ability to fill in pdf
forms that I can download and then fill in?

Adope Acrobat Reader, can do what you want, but it's a huge monster.
I have it installed for formfilling and special printing, but for daily
viewing of PDF files I use SumatraPDF very fast, light veight and free.

So which one did you mean to mention? Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader?

Before you get your nickers all twisted, you might check up what they call
their program to day, here is an image of my open with popup, menu for PDF
files (in Danish):
http://asger-p.dk/AdopeAcrobatReaderDC.png

The footprint of Adope Acrobat Reader 32bit is:

On disk 227MB
In ram (no files open ) about 20MB
In ram (75 kb file) about 57MB
IN ram (1.6MB user manual) about 164MB


The footprint of SumatraPDF 64bit is:

On disk 12MB
In ram (no files open ) about 4,6MB
IN ram (1.6MB user manual) about 35MB

Best regards
Asger
--
http://Asger-P.dk/software

"VanguardLH" wrote

| Wouldn't the annotate feature in PDFX Viewer/Editor, or any PDF viewer
| with annotation, let you do that within the same program?

Good question. I hadn't thought of that. Silly me.
I tried the PDFXCV "typewriter" tool on a sample
PDF and it seems to work. But in the case of MA forms
it might not be worth the trouble. I opened one of
those and was reminded of why PSP was handy:
They're designed to be machine-readable. All text
has to be monospaced to fit in boxes and there
are lots of ovals to be filled in. ("Ovals must be
filled in fully with black ink.") A very irritating set
of forms. The ovals are fairly easy to do with an
ellipse fill in PSP. And the text is fairly easy once I
work out how many spaces to put between each
letter with the PSP text tool.

So I guess the answer is that, yes, PDFXCV can be
used to fill out generic forms that require simple text
input in defined fields, even if the fields are not designed
as input fields. But in some cases, like the MA state tax
forms, the problem is not so much the software but
rather that the form is an outdated design.

Asger Joergensen wrote:

Hi VanguardLH

VanguardLH wrote:

Asger Joergensen wrote:

Walter E. wrote:

I am looking for a free pdf reader with the ability to fill in pdf
forms that I can download and then fill in?

Adope Acrobat Reader, can do what you want, but it's a huge monster.
I have it installed for formfilling and special printing, but for daily
viewing of PDF files I use SumatraPDF very fast, light veight and free.

So which one did you mean to mention? Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader?

Before you get your nickers all twisted, you might check up what they call
their program to day, ...

I forgot the name change to Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. "DC" means their
Document Cloud features where they integrated premium features for
online services you pay for: export PDF, send & track, PDF pack. They
also added some client-side features you pay for: convert PDF to Word or
Excel. I suspect the DC component and their mention of synchronizing
between desktop and phone apps for your PDF docs means you get an online
sync service to get at your docs on your desktop or phone, like how
OneDrive and Google Drive can be used (if they actually store files in
some limited file quota server) or how Firefox and Google syncs work (to
get each instance of the program on desktop or phone app to stay in
sync). I haven't use Adobe Reader for awhile so I don't know what all
extra features they dumped into that product. If you use some or all of
them, they are features. If you don't use them, they are bloatware.

The name change for their Reader product aligns with their name change
for their editor: Adobe Acrobat DC (editor) and Adobe Acrobat Reader DC
(viewer + annotations).

The footprint of Adope Acrobat Reader 32bit is:

On disk 227MB
In ram (no files open ) about 20MB
In ram (75 kb file) about 57MB
IN ram (1.6MB user manual) about 164MB

The footprint of SumatraPDF 64bit is:

On disk 12MB
In ram (no files open ) about 4,6MB
IN ram (1.6MB user manual) about 35MB

PDF-Xchange Editor:
disk footprint:
memory footprints:
program only = 42MB (68MB)
82KB PDF file = 51MB (79MB)
1.1MB PDF file = 51MB (80MB)

Note that those measurements were solely using the "Memory (Private
Working Set)" column in Task Manager which is not all of the memory
footprint. By either adding the "Working Set" column to the Processes
table in Task Manager or using SysInternals' Process Explorer, the
memory footprints are much larger (shown above in parenthesis). The
Peak Working Set values would be a bit higher. I don't what values you
listed.

PDF-Xchange Viewer/Editor does not have the sandbox available in Adobe
Reader. Sumatra is missing tons of features missing from PDF-Xchange
Viewer/Editor: Javascript (which you might disable but is handy for
interactive forms, like those that valid input, from known good sources
- some companies have these for internal docs), annotation, support for
run command on PDF load and open attachment on PDF load (again security
issues from unknown sources but can be set to only all other PDFs to
open), and lots more. As I recall, Sumatra obeys PDF restrictions
(e.g., no printing, do not allow copying [to then use pasting]) while
those can be disabled in other PDF viewers. Image rendering within PDFs
in Sumatra is not as good. Not even text quality is as good in Sumatra.
Click on the following images to enlarge to see how quality varies
between the samples on different PDF viewers:

http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/upl...ty-samples.jpg
(along with [lack of] sharpness, different PDF viewers use different
font sizes)

http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/upl...r-quality2.png
(100% doc size)
http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/upl...uality-200.png
(200% doc size)

To me, and comparing just Adobe Reader, PDF-Xchange Viewer, and Sumatra,
that is the order of the quality of their rendered text. See
http://www.ghacks.net/2010/07/02/pdf...h-is-the-best/
for the snapshots. Alas, that article is dated back in 2010 and I
haven't yet found a recent equivalent article to make sure there have
not been improvements with successive versions of each PDF viewer. I
have heard users complain why rendering is so much better in Adobe
Reader (that they want to get rid of) versus some other PDF viewer (that
they tried to replace for Adobe Reader).

So it depends on how robust or minimalist you want to go and probably
still on the quality of the rendering you want. Users might want a lot
more than what minimalist Sumatra provides. They might want less than
the monster of Adobe [Acrobat] Reader [DC]. They might be willing to
forego the best document rendering and poor quality rendering is okay
for them. Between those two sets of extremes are other choices.