Replacements for Adobe Acrobat

Yet another post that doesn't have anything to do with photography, but I thought it would be of interest to some readers...

I have been frustrated with Adobe Acrobat Reader for quite some time. At least in my experience, it loads slowly and locks up more often than I would like, even on my high-powered work machines that are running Vista. I began looking around for a replacement and after doing some searching found the free version of FoxIt Reader. This allows you to read PDF files on your machine, and is a nice replacement for Acrobat Reader. Even the free version seems to offer many more features than Reader, though I haven't explored them much. It seems to be very compact so it loads quickly, and it hasn't choked yet on any of the PDF files I have fed.

For producing PDF files, there are free alternatives to Adobe Acrobat. If you're running Office 2007 and that is where you will be generating most of your PDF files, then you can download a free add-in from the Microsoft site. To produce PDF files from other software, I installed the free version of CutePDF. So far it has impressed me as being more compact and snappier than Acrobat, with what as far as I can tell is a fairly complete set of features.

Sooner or later I will start posting pictures again. Lately I have been photographing people, including a lot of portraits, and I'm not making those publicly viewable. I'll be traveling to Korea again later in the month however so hope to come back from that trip with some nice shots to share with you.