PDF-XChange

Free PDF Viewer

This free PDF Viewer is an excellent alternative to Adobe Reader. It has some very nice features not found in Adobe Reader, but where it matters it follows the familiar shortcuts and layout of the established market leader.

It displays PDF files as single pages, continuous, or facing pages. Zooming and panning is easy with a scroll-wheel mouse, while keyboard users will find document navigation just as easy. The find toolbar will quickly search for any word.

The developers continue to add new features and fix bugs, releasing updates about every two weeks. Their responsiveness to user feedback via the support forum is exemplary.

Key Features

1. Professional Edition
2. The Loupe
3. Pan and Zoom Tool
4. Preview and Page Thumbnails
5. Commenting and Markup Tools
6. Custom Stamps
7. Multiple Document Interface
8. Compact Interface
9. Customisable Interface
10. Fullscreen Mode
11. Export as Image
12. High Resolution Snapshots
13. Navigation of Views
14. Remember Previous View
15. Customise Recent Files List
16. Browser Plugins
17. Open in Other PDF Viewers
18. Conclusions

Professional Edition

The release of build 2.0.0035 coincided with the release of the Professional version. Both free and paid-for versions are now merged, and the version number has increased to version 2x. All of the features that were available in the free version, such as adding comments and highlighting, can still be used without any watermark being added. The Professional features are available in the free version, but documents are saved with a watermark prior to registration.

1. Pages can be deleted
2. Insert, Delete, Rename, or Edit Bookmarks

Not all Pro features on the menus are complete yet. During the development stage, the upgrade price will increase as more features are implemented. See this page for a table of new features scheduled to be included in later versions. The Pro Features can be hidden in the free version from Preferences, Registration to avoid a watermark being added to your documents on saving them.

The Loupe

This is a zoom window that shows a magnified view of the page underneath a transparent rectangle that can be dragged around the page.

Drag the slider click the buttons, or select a value from the drop list to change the zoom level. Click on the camera icon (bottom right) to take a snapshot of the zoomed area. The loupe window can be resized and positioned anywhere on the monitor, even outside of the PDF-XChange window so if you have a wide-screen monitor you will find these feature even more useful. Resizing the loupe window simultaneously resizes the transparent rectangle. Resizing the rectangle changes the zoom level in the loupe window. Move the transparent rectangle pans the view in the loupe window.

The Pan & Zoom Tool

This is another very comfortable way to view magnified documents. It is the reverse of the loupe. If you zoom in on the main window so that the page is bigger than the window, the Pan & Zoom Tool shows a thumbnail of the page, with a transparent rectangle that you drag around to pan the document in the main window. The Pan & Zoom navigator can be resized and repositioned anywhere on the monitor.

If the PDF-XChange window is maximised, try putting the navigator in the top right corner. That will cover the advertisement in the free version, which is otherwise wasted space. It then barely intrudes into the document viewing area. It has four blue buttons for navigating the document pages, zoom buttons, and a drop list for selecting the zoom level.

Resizing the blue transparent rectangle will change the zoom level in the main document window and simultaneously change the viewed area.

Either one of these two viewing methods is far superior to using the drag hand or dynamic zoom in Adobe Reader, although that was also quite useful. I say “was” because I won’t want to use it any more after trying these new methods.

Preview Thumbnails

The file open dialogue shows a thumbnail of the selected file with information about the file below. If you have many files with similar names, this can help to locate the right one. This preview and information pane remains attached to the side of the Open File dialogue if you resize it.

Page Thumbnails

Page thumbnails can be shown in a panel at any edge of the screen or in a floating window. The thumbnails can be resized and displayed in several columns if you have the space to spare. Shortcut Control + T will show/hide the thumbnails panel.

When viewing PDF documents in single page mode, when you drag on the scroll handle, a thumbnail of the current page pops up by the side of the scroll bar and changes to show the page that will be displayed when you release the mouse button.

This is another neat feature in PDF-XChange that helps when browsing long PDF files. Although of limited usefulness when browsing reams of plain text unless you know the page number that you are seeking, if documents contain at least a few pictures, tables, or illustrations, it is a great aid to finding the page that you’re looking for.

Commenting and Mark-up Tools

You can add sticky notes, text boxes, lines, arrows, shapes and text to PDF documents. You can highlight, strikeout, or underline selected text. Comments and mark-up are saved with the document and can be modified or deleted later. No advertising watermarks are added to the PDF file when you save comments and markup.

Latin Extended characters can be used in document markup. If, like me, you need to work in languages other than English, this is very useful.

Sticky notes will be labelled with the user log-in name by default. The name can be changed by adding a name under log-in name in Preferences, Identity.  The properties of comments and markup can be modified and saved as the default. To save text defaults, right-click in text, and select “Text Formatting,” “Save as Default Style for Text Formatting.”

Other users can reply to comments or sticky notes using their own ID or name, and a different colour. Comments can have transparency so that the original PDF text is still legible behind the comments when they are open.

Double-click any markup to add a comment about it. A new sticky note comment with the same colour as the markup will point to it. Unlike sticky notes, these comments won’t show any icon when closed, so they are completely hidden in the document when closed, but they will be listed in the comments panel.

To add further markup to existing markup, e.g. to underline text that is already highlighted, hold down the shift key while using the underline tool.

A list of comments and markup in your document is shown in the Comments panel (Control M to show/hide this). Use the panel to find comments, delete them quickly, or change their properties.

N.B. Comments never print, while markup does if you have not changed the default option to print document and markup on the Print dialogue. Use text boxes or callouts to add markup that can be printed.

Custom Stamps

This feature allows you to import images or PDF files to use as custom stamps. Add an image or logo to your documents. Resize stamps and move them easily. Use the properties to make them semi- transparent to use as a watermark. PDF files can contain many pages with one stamp on each page. Because they are vectors, they look sharp at any size. Download my source file for PagePlus X2 to create your own PDF stamps file. This requires Serif™ PagePlus X2 or later. Modify the text, change the font, colours, or design, and publish to PDF to create your own custom stamps PDF source.

Multiple Document Interface

The Document Tab Toolbar is on by default, but you can turn it off in Preferences if you want to save space. Even if it is off, you can switch to other open documents from the Window menu or with the Control Tab key shortcut.

The tile icon shows a page of thumbnails with the current view on all open documents. This is another feature that is streets ahead of anything I have seen elsewhere. If you work on multiple PDF documents and constantly have to cross-reference what you were reading earlier, it is so easy to find what you want with just two clicks — one on the tile icon, then one on the appropriate thumbnail.

There is an option to turn off the multiple document interface, just in case you like to do things the hard way. You can allow multiple instances of PDF-XChange, or allow only one instance to be active, thus keeping all open documents within one window.

Compact Interface

You can position toolbars beside the menus.

Customisable Interface

The release of build 2.0.0038 adds the option to customise the toolbars, menus, and keyboard shortcuts.

New toolbars can be created, menus can be edited or deleted (but not added), icons can be added and moved, shown as text or images, and shortcuts can be assigned to tools and commands or changed in the command properties dialogue.

The Opera plugin can be customised in the same way. The screenshot shows a small Opera tab with a PDF loaded in the plugin. The toolbars can be arranged on any edge of the window.

The menu button has its text hidden to save space.

Fullscreen Mode

If you just want to concentrate on reading, enter the fullscreen mode (F12). The more usual F11 shortcut will toggle the Toolbars and Menu on/off in both screen modes. Even with the toolbars off, you can switch to other documents with Control Tab, and use the Pan and Zoom Window to navigate the current document. Press Escape to exit from fullscreen mode.

Export as Image

Export any document to a Multipage TIFF image, or to any of the popular image formats — PNG, GIF, JPG PCX, or BMP — and some formats I am not familiar with. Set the resolution to 72 dpi or 2,400. Change the page background colour or make it transparent. Automatically assign file names to the images with variables.

High Resolution Snapshots

You can change the default resolution for snapshots from Edit, Preferences, Snapshot Tool, Use Fixed Resolution for snapshot images, to print quality resolutions of 300 or 600 dpi (and up to 2400 dpi) instead of using low screen resolution of 72 or 96 dpi. Then, whenever you use the snapshot tool a high resolution bitmap is copied to the Windows clipboard. This is useful when you wish to capture fine detail from a PDF file.

The same resolution is used when you take a snapshot from the Loupe Window or the Pan and Zoom Window.

Navigation of Views

You can navigate back and forth between different views on the same document. This is very useful for finding your place again after searching for something elsewhere in the document. The shortcuts Alter Left Arrow and Alter Right Arrow are sensible and therefore easy to remember.

Remember Previous View

PDF-XChange remembers the previous view of each document. On reopening a document, whether from Windows Explorer or from the recent files menu, it reopens at the same place as last time, and at the same zoom level. This is a huge time saver. I wish all of my favourite programs had this feature. Open at last editing position is available in OpenOffice, and open fonts from last time is an option FontCreator, but a similar feature is not yet available in MainType or PagePlus.

Customise Recent Files List

It is now possible to pin favourite files to the Recent Files list. The maximum number of files on the list can be set in Preferences, General, at a very generous limit of up to 200 files. There is also a button in preferences to clear the list. This brings up a confirmation dialogue where you can clear the entire list, or leave just the pinned files (the default). The most productive method may be to keep the number of files fairly low, and to pin the files that you need to open frequently.

Browser Plugins

The screenshot shows a PDF file in an Opera tab (resized to fit this page). If you don’t need the toolbars, they can be turned off from the status line at the bottom.

I prefer to use the external PDF-XChange reader, as one then has the added convenience of the multiple document interface. However, if you just want to open one or two PDF files from the internet and display them directly in your browser, the plugin is a neat way of doing this, and with the PDF-XChange plugin, you still have access to all the comment and markup tools. If you open a file in your browser, then change your mind and wish to open it in the external viewer, you can do this from the icon at the bottom right of the browser plugin.

Open in Other PDF Viewers

At the bottom right of the interface is an icon with a droplist. If, for some reason, PDF-XChange doesn’t display a PDF file as expected, you can quickly open it in Adobe Reader, Foxit Reader, or (presumably) other PDF readers installed on your system.

This kind of open-mindedness is rare in software vendors.

Conclusions

This application blows Adobe Reader out of the water. It is faster, has a better feature set, and an easier to use interface. For the most useful features there are no banners, no watermarks on documents, no limitations or restrictions, just a small banner ad for other products by the same company.

 There is also a support forum where the developers respond promptly to any problems. Bugs are usually fixed quickly with frequent updates. The history of changes (added at my request) shows the latest bug fixes and new features. This one is a keeper. Download it now. You may never open Adobe Reader again.