PDF Xchange Vs. Foxit
Adobe Reader has drawn criticism for its utter lack of editing features and frequent prompting for updates. Fortunately, Windows users have many free alternatives, including Foxit Reader and PDF-XChange Viewer. Both PDF readers include tabbed browsing, comparable upgrade prices -- $49 and $44, respectively, at the time of publication -- and similar, overlapping feature sets.
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Installation
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The default installation settings for Foxit includes Foxit Reader, shell extensions, browser plugins for Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Chrome and the Ask.com-powered Foxit PDF Creator Toolbar, a browser search bar. Foxit also asks you to set Ask.com as your home page. The basic free installation of PDF-XChange includes the PDF-XChange Viewer, shell extensions, browser plugins for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Chrome, and optical character recognition, or OCR, support for English, French, German and Spanish. Even limited support for OCR is rare among PDF readers at the time of publication.
First Usage
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Your first launch of Foxit begins with a welcome wizard that asks you to choose from multiple skins and select your default settings for opening files. Upon completing the wizard, the basic view loads and about a third of the start screen is taken up by ads encouraging you to upgrade to Foxit's commercial PDF tools. The right side of the user interface is taken up by a window that allows you to share PDFs to Facebook and Twitter using Foxit's OnDemand CMS. Sharing a 2MB PDF file to Twitter can take about several minutes over DSL. By contrast, PDF-XChange merely prompts you to choose whether you would like to display PDFs in-browser or launch the external viewer. On first launch, The default display for PDF-XChange is relatively minimalist, with no ads but also no sharing widget.
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Support for Annotations
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Unlike Adobe Reader, both Foxit Reader and PDF-XChange offer users the ability to add new or edit existing PDF bookmarks, highlight text in multiple colors, and add comments and markup using both text and external image files. For importing external images, only PDF-XChange supports transparency. Nevertheless, Foxit has the added benefit of a spellchecker and a toolbar with easily accessible buttons for each annotation mode. PDF-XChange, with its simpler default display, requires you to use menus to add or edit annotations.
Optical Character Recognition and Text-to-Speech
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PDF-XChange supports OCR PDFs and even has a typewriter mode for identifying characters in scanned images. To enable optical character recognition for Foxit, you must upgrade from Foxit Reader to an entry-level commercial PDF utility, Foxit PhantomPDF. On the other hand, the free version of Foxit has text-to-speech integration that will work with any voices installed on your system. PDF-XChange does not include text-to-speech capabilities.
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References
- Photo Credit Dynamic Graphics Group/Dynamic Graphics Group/Getty Images
