AutoHotkey Community

DrSamRaza_1 · Joined: 15 Apr 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Pakistan

Dear BoBo

Thanks for the effort.
I have used FoxitPDf... and found it exactly the way you described it. but IMHO Adobe Acrobat Reader offers so much more than this utility.

I agree that Standard installation of Acrobat Reader is somewhat lengthy and it is annoying when it takes so much time to load, but a good person named Ryan found a solution and it somehow tweaked Acrobat Reader installation as well as the program itself. (With Adobe people's permission).

Now the installtions takes only 1 minute (less if you have a fast machine) and program starts in no time without showing annoying Splash Screen . Some other useful tweaks also made it easier to install and use.

Please visit http://ryanvm.msfn.org/, and find out for yourself.
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Intelligence helps, but hard work is the key to Success

holomind · Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 300 Location: Munich, Germany

this tool is quite good, as compared to adobe reader, one can have 2 pages side by side in fullscreen which i was missing in adobe reader all the time.

garry · Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 1028 Location: switzerland

Thanks, I hated always to use pdf, now I like it with Foxit
like these small programs, don't need installation, very quick and handy

SKAN · Joined: 26 Dec 2005 Posts: 5814

Additional info:
During the first run Foxit associates .PDF extension with itself.
Foxit is great!. I have been using it for many months..NOW, I do not remember where I put the EXE, & I don't have an ICON for it. But every time I download a PDF and double-click it., Foxit opens it .. very fast!

Regards, Smile

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SKAN - Suresh Kumar A N

Titan · Joined: 11 Aug 2004 Posts: 5049 Location: imaginationland

SKAN · Joined: 26 Dec 2005 Posts: 5814

aarondellis · Joined: 15 Aug 2005 Posts: 57

Foxit will associate itself even if you have Adobe Reader installed first.

It is a nice app. Here at work we have created fillable forms with Adobe. Foxit will not allow you to fill the forms.

I use Foxit for most things but still have to have Adobe if I want to fill in a form at work.

A great feature of Foxit is the typewriter. You can type text over any pdf file and "fill" it in. Then if you want to save this pdf you can print to a pdf printer like PrimoPDF. This works great if you want to quickly fill in a pdf form, even if it was not designed to be fillable.

Lemming · Joined: 20 Dec 2005 Posts: 150 Location: Malaysia

Yea, I've used Foxit Reader for quite a while. I use it for most PDFs but I still keep Adobe's Reader around because it works better in my company's workflow.

One major shortcoming in FR is that it cannot select columns of text properly. This is the common layout for newspapers and magazines.

If your text is in three columns for example, selecting them will cause FR to treat them as one column of text. So if you copy and paste it elsewhere you'll get single lines of text with words merged from the three columns, which is quite useless!

Anyway, here are some tips for Foxit Reader:

1) To avoid the "associate with all PDFs" problem, just download the Zip file, which has no installer. It just contains the reader program which is ready to run, and will not try to associate itself with all PDFs.

2) Foxit Reader has a handy "Text Viewer" mode, but it will not allow you to select text in this mode. I think they want you to pay for a text converter. However, Ahk is able to read the text in this Text Viewer window, at least according to Windows Spy. So a DIY text converter might be possible, tho I keep putting it off. But again, FR doesn't know how to select columns of text properly, as I mentioned earlier.

3) You can get better graphics in FR if you d/l the gdiplus module, which is also avail free from the same site.

4) To select columns of text properly, you will still need Adobe's Reader. However, you can usually survive by just installing Acrobat Reader version 6.05, which is less of a resource hog than version 7.

-Lemming Cool