pdf viewer

[Ga Bowen]

Not strictly a H+M question, so feel free to move if necessary.

We have installed documentation on one of our machines in the form of the eWriter app.

It has links to pdfs which we store on the machine.

Which pdf viewer would you recommend? Obviously looking for as light as possible, but reliability the number 1 requirement.

[Horst_Reichert_PN]

I think the best PDF-viewer is the one which is liked most by the actual user.
In my opinion patronizing people which application to use for a purpose is not good.
Most computers have a Web-Browser supporting PDF already installed, thus this is normally "good enough".

[Tim Green]

As I understand it, you are only looking for a viewer for this one machine. As Horst noted, the simplest solution is for the PDF to open in a current browser -- both Edge and Chrome are excellent for that at the moment, and Edge has the benefit that it's always installed.

As far as third-party PDF viewers are concerned, that has become something of a jungle in the last few years. You probably want to avoid free third-party viewers, because you will either get ads or they will be making some kind of use of your data to monetize their product -- otherwise they couldn't offer the viewer free of charge, unless you're on a Linux machine. I don't want to make any recommendations because I'm not familiar with the market at the moment. But I would strongly recommend doing extensive searches for independent reviews before installing any third-party PDF viewer at the moment.

For what it's worth, I just use Adobe Reader. It opens just as fast as anything else, is genuinely free because Adobe wants to promote the use of the PDF format, and you're guaranteed maximum compatibility.

[Ga Bowen]

Thanks for the replies.

Don't think I made it clear, the viewer is to be installed on an industrial production line machine, it's not for personal PC use.

I'll have a look at Edge/AR and see what is smallest.

On my quest I did discover Okular which has it's roots in Linux:

https://okular.kde.org/en-gb/

https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail ... n-gb&gl=GB

Seems to be well received, I might have a play with it.

[Alexander Halser]

I came across the "Sumatra PDF Reader" years ago, because a user had encountered a problem with that viewer with one of the PDFs created with Help+Manual. Since then, I have a version of that program in my toolbox folder. It's a 6 MB light-weight no-frills self-contained executable that just runs without installation.

https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader