PDF-XChange

Free PDF Viewer

Review Updated for Build 2.0.42.8

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 once a month. Their responsiveness to user feedback via the support forum is exemplary. Reported bugs are often fixed in the next release.

Key Features

1. Professional Edition
2. Editing Security Settings
3. Find Text in PDF Files
4. Search Providers
5. The Loupe
6. Pan and Zoom Tool
7. Preview and Page Thumbnails
8. Windows Explorer Thumbnails
9. Commenting and Markup Tools
10. Managing Comments
11. Measuring Tools
12. Link Tools
13. Custom Stamps
14. Multiple Document Interface
15. Compact Interface
16. Customisable Interface
17. Fullscreen Mode
18. Tiling, N-up, and Booklet Printing
19. Export as Image
20. High Resolution Snapshots
21. Navigation of Views
22. Remember Previous View
23. Customise Recent Files List
24. Browser Plugins
25. Open in Other PDF Viewers
26. A Note on Memory Use
27. Conclusions

Professional Edition

The Professional and free versions are the same program. Features in the free version, such as adding comments and highlighting, can be used without any watermark being added. The Professional features are also available in the free version, but documents are saved with a watermark until it is registered.

1. Pages can be extracted to a new PDF file
2. Pages can be deleted
3. Pages can be cropped
4. Insert, Delete, Rename, or Edit Bookmarks
5. Summarise Comments
6. Flatten All Comments
7. Digital Signing of PDF documents

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 accidental use of any features that will result in a watermark being added to your documents on saving them.

Editing Security Settings

If a document is not secured, or if you know the password, security settings can be changed to allow/disallow commenting, printing, copying, etc.

You can also add a digital signature from the Document menu. This is a Pro feature that will add a watermark to files if you save them from the unregistered version.

Find Text in PDF Files

Open the Search Pane to find text in the current document, all open documents, or documents in folders on your hard drive. In my tests, finding text was nearly fourteen times faster than Adobe Reader. Searching a very large (11,800 page) test document for a common word:

• PDF-XChange 42.8 found 7100 words in 2:10
• Foxit Reader 3.1.2.1013 found 7100 words in 6:15
• Adobe Reader 9.2 found 7100 words in 20:00
• Adobe Reader 7.08 found 7100 words in 29:00 (sic)

Searching for a word in 10 folders of 333 documents

• PDF-XChange found 2526 entries in 79 documents in 1:45
• Foxit Reader found 2490 entries in 77 documents in 2:00
• Adobe Reader 9.2 found 2506 entries in 79 documents in 9:10

Shortcuts F4 and Shift F4 will find the next and previous search results. These can be customised if you prefer to use the Adobe Reader defaults of Ctrl G and Ctrl Shift G. Personally, I find F4 more intutive since F3 and Shift F3 are used for find in page. I never noticed the Adobe Reader shortcuts before.

One thing it doesn’t do yet though is to find ligatures used in OpenType fonts.

Search Providers

Text selected in the PDF file can be searched using any of the default search providers: Bing, Google, Live Search, Meta UA (Ukrainian), Wikipedia (en), Yahoo, RandexRU (Russian).

To add a custom search, search for the word “TEST” in your desired search engine, copy the URL and paste it into the New search dialogue from Preferences, Search Providers, Add New…

Searches can be moved up or down the list, or removed permanently.

I have added custom searches for Access to Insight and the Pali Text Society Dictionary.

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 current 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 this feature even more useful. Resizing the loupe window simultaneously resizes the transparent rectangle. Resizing the rectangle changes the zoom level in the loupe window. Moving 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 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. They can be resized and displayed in several columns if you have the space to spare. Shortcut Ctrl + T will show/hide the thumbnails panel.

The orange rectangle shows the view port.

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.

Windows Explorer Thumbnails

The latest version now includes a Windows shell extension to display thumbnails of PDF files in Windows Explorer. When using thumbnail mode in Windows Explorer, the thumbnails are shown instead of PDF document icons.

The 20 Mbyte ZIP download file contains two installation files — one for the viewer itself and one for the Shell extension for viewing thumbnails in Windows Explorer. Installation of this extension is optional, but you might miss it if you don’t know it is there.

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.

Undo and Redo text editing and annotation changes with the usual shortcuts (Ctrl Z, Ctrl Y) or use the toolbar buttons. Copy and paste annotations within the same document or between documents.

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.

All comments show a tool tip when the user passes the mouse over the markup.

Markup has control points. For example, the callouts have one where the arrow joins the text box. Drag that to move the arrow to any side of the text box. Drag the other control points to reshape the text box, or to move the arrow. The mouse cursor will change when it is positioned over a control point.

Toolbar icons have a tool tip that shows the current default properties for the commenting tools. Right-click on the markup to edit its properties.

The defaults for all document markup can be edited in the Comments Style Palette, which can be shown from the Comments menu.

From the Properties toolbar, blend modes for markup can be selected. This will change the colour of markup when it is overlayed on different coloured backgrounds. The stacking order of markup can also be changed from the context menu.

In the Comments Style Palette, select a tool from the list on the left, click on the large default style tooltip icon on the right, and change the properties from the properties toolbar that then appears at the bottom right of the palette.

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 don’t normally 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 are meant to be printed. Comments can be printed by using the advanced print options. They will be printed as they appear on the screen, whether they are opened or closed. Their transparency for printing can be set in the advanced options.

Managing Comments

From the Comments menu one can selectively show or hide comments in a document. Another submenu allows one to view only comments of a specific type, for example only text editing markup or only notes.

When printing a PDF document, there are options to print the document only, document and markup, document and stamps, or form field data only.

Comments can be exported as an XFDF data file, or summarised as a Rich Text File.

In the Comments Pane, comments can be sorted in order of page, type, modification date, creation date, author, or colour. Double-click on a comment to locate it. Right-click on a comment to change its Z-order.

Bookmark icons can be hidden, the tree can be expanded or collapsed, the bookmark text can be enlarged/reduced. Right-click on a bookmark for a full list of options — delete, create, etc.

Measuring Tools

These new tools allow the user to add dimension lines to PDF drawings. On selecting the tool, and before drawing a line, you can set the scale using the Properties toolbar (Control E). In the illustration the scale is set to 1 in = 1 in, but you can also set the scale unit to points, picas, cm, mm, feet, metres, yards, kilometres, or miles. When a dimension line is selected, the Distance Info pop-up shows the current scale and measurement. Dimension lines can be drawn at any angle, the extension lines can be resized, and the label can be moved. Line weights, line styles, line endings, line colours, line opacity, and line-endings fill colours can be set.

There are also tools for measuring the perimeter or area of elements in the drawing. All of these measuring tools are available in the free version of PDF-XChange.

In Preferences, Measurement, there is now an option to show rulers, guides, and grid lines. Annotations such as comments or distance lines can be snapped to the grid or guides for neat alignment.

The spacing, colour, and style of grid lines, and the colour and style of guide lines can be changed.

Guides, grid, and rulers are on the customise dialogue for adding to toolbars or menus, though they currently have no icons — only text, but that can be changed, as can the shortcuts to show hide these new options.

The snapping senstivity can be set for the different types of annotation.

Link Tools

The tools allow the user to add rectangles and quadrilaterals to PDF files with links that jump to other pages in the existing document or to an internet URL.

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.

Any stamp collection can be hidden from the toolbar drop down. Users can add stamp collections for specific tasks, and hide the stamps that they don’t currently need.

Any image can be pasted from the clipboard as a custom stamp, either directly onto the page, or into the custom stamp palette. If you want transparency though, import a 32-bit image into the stamp palette.

Multiple Document Interface

The document Navigation Tabs are on by default, but you can turn them off from the view menu to save space. Even if they are off, you can switch to other open documents from the Window menu or with the Control Tab shortcut. Drag and drop tabs to change the order on the tab bar. Righ-click to show the menu.

To restart with the current open documents next time, change the setting in Preferences, General, Restore last session when application starts.

To preview other open documents, hover the mouse pointer over the document navigation tabs. The thumbnail shows a preview of the current document view, the file path (truncated if it is long) and the file name. If you want to disable this feature, you can now do so from the right-click menu on the tabs.

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, and combine menus with others. On a 1280x1024 or larger resolution monitor, one row of toolbars may be all you need. Below is my current toolbar setup split into two rows to fit the web page.

Bookmarks, Comments, Thumbnails | Document properties, Save | File menu, Recent Files, Edit, View, Tools (including Document and Comment menus), Help | Hand tool, Snapshot, Text selection, Export as image, First page, next page, previous page, last page, Undo, Redo

Typewriter, Sticky Note, Highlight, Strikeout, Underline, Arrow, Line, Pencil, Rectangle, Ellipse, Distance, Stamps | Full screen, Fit page, Fit width, Single page, Continuous, Facing, Continuous facing | Help, Check for Updates.

Customisable Interface

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.

To fit this web page the screen shot shows a very small window with two PDFs loaded. A customised toolbar is docked at the bottom — it would normally be in a single row (click the image to see at full size). The menus are on the same toolbar. The Launch toolbar is floating in the corner.

The page background and the application workspace (only visible if you tile windows) have beenchanged by editing the Windows registry. Save the text below from notepad as a *.reg file and double-click it to modify the default colours. These values give the turquoise page background and the orange application workspace.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Track er Software\PDFViewer\View\Colors]
"PagesBack"=dword:BCED00
"AppWorkspace"=dword:00A9EC

Watch this YouTube video to see how to add shortcuts to Customise Tools

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.

Tiling, N-up, and Booklet Printing

Large documents can be tiled onto several sheets. For example, scale an A4 document up by about 187% and print it on four sheets. This powerful feature makes it easy to produce posters from the same standard document used for handouts.

The illustration shows the preview for tile 4 of 4 from an A4 page scaled to 187% with a 4.9 pt overlap between tiles. Click on the Complete View link to show the full page.

N-up printing allows printing of multiple copies on a single sheet. The document will automatically be scaled down to fit 2, 4, 8 or a custom number of copies onto a single sheet.

The document can be rotated automatically to use the sheets more efficiently.

Booklet printing will automatically arrange a multipage A4 portrait document for printing as an A5 booklet on A4 landscape.

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.

Users with a middle mouse button can scroll quickly through long documents in continuous mode, or scroll in any direction when zoomed in to view a detailed drawing, for example. Click the middle mouse button to place the scroll anchor anywhere on the page, then drag in any direction. Scrolling long documents is fast and smooth, with excellent control.

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.

Manage Recent Files list lets you change the place pinned files at the top of the list, show extended tooltips (with previews), set the confirmation before clearing the list, and clear the list on exit.

Restore last session. Reopen all files that were previously open in the viewer when restarting. The setting is on the General Tab of Preferences.

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.

A Note on Memory Use

PDF-XChange uses considerably more memory than Foxit Reader, but less than Adobe Reader. Many misinformed PC users complain about high memory use of programs, so we need to point out a few facts about memory use.

1. Using more memory is good, not bad. If your PC has lots of memory it can be used to cache pages and make the viewer display pages faster. The important point is that if other applications request memory the viewer should release it.
2. In theory, PDF-XChange can use up to 240 Mbytes on my 1 Gigabyte system, but it doesn’t matter if that improves performance. When scrolling and zooming large documents the action is smooth and almost instantaneous. In Foxit Reader there is a noticeable jerkiness. Adobe Reader’s performance is better than Foxit Reader’s, but not as smooth as the performance in PDF-XChange. Nevertheless, PDF-XChange now consistently uses less memory on a huge (279 Mbyte) test document than earlier versions.
3. By default, PDF-XChange will use a maximum of 25% of available memory. Users can change this in Preferences, Performance to between 10% and 75%
4. If you want to use other applications, but wish to keep PDF-XChange open, you can minimise it. Memory use will drop immediately below 2 Mbytes. There is also an option in Preferences, General, to minimise it to the system tray. This removes the icon from the start bar, but memory won’t be released immediately. After some time of not being used, the memory usage will drop, but not as low as if you don’t use this option. Either way, it won’t affect performance unless your system runs out of free memory and starts using the Windows swap file.

Conclusions

This application continues to improve with each new release. It is faster than Adobe Reader, has a better feature set, and a more customisable interface. For the most commonly used 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 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.