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.
- Pages can be extracted to a new PDF file
- Pages can be deleted
- Pages can be cropped
- Insert, Delete, Rename, or Edit Bookmarks
- Summarise Comments
- Flatten All Comments
- Digital Signing of PDF documents
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.
New in build 2.5.194 bookmarks can now be added, edited, or deleted in the free version.
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.
An option in Preferences, Security allows the user to set notification levels for launching executables and opening attachments from a PDF file.
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, PDF-XChange was well over twice
as fast as Adobe Reader searching for a common word in an 1,180 page test document
— 10 copies of a 118 page book, created just to test the performance of PDF Viewers
— and well over four times faster searching eight folders containing 338 PDF files.
The large test file is now ten times smaller than it was so that Foxit Reader won’t
crash in my test.
- PDF-XChange 2.5.210 found 670 entries in 0:47
- PDF-XChange Editor build 301 found 670 entries in 0:41
- Foxit Reader 6.0.2.0413 found 670 entries in 2:45
- Adobe Reader 11.0.3 found 640 entries in 1:54
Searching for a word in 8 folders of 338 documents
My personal collection of PDF documents, some of which may contain the search string several times, while others may not contain it at all. Most of the test set doesn’t change.
- PDF-XChange found 2899 entries in 86 documents in 2:43
(including page content, document information, bookmarks, and comments) - PDF-XChange Editor found 2859 entries in 81 documents in 9:31
- Foxit Reader found 2839 entries in 81 documents in 2:55
- Adobe Reader found 2931 entries in 86 documents in 12:45
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 intuitive since F3 and Shift F3 are used for find in page. I never noticed the Adobe Reader shortcuts before.
PDF-XChange build 2.0.43 or later can find ligatures used in OpenType fonts. New in build 2.5.202 is an option in Preferences, Page Display to expand common ligatures to text on copy.
Optical Character Recognition
New in version 2.5.200 is an option to recognise text in PDF Documents that contain scanned images of text, but not actual text. The process takes a few minutes — perhaps 15 seconds per page — but the resulting document is then searchable without any obvious visible change to the document, and without much increase in file size. A typical 20 page PDF of 5.18 Mbytes was 5.4 Mbytes after OCR and saving as a new document. Recognition was accurate, except on some small text. This feature is available in the free version. No watermarks are added when using it.
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. 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.
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 installation program offers an option to install the Shell Extension for viewing thumbnails in Windows Explorer. Installation of this extension is the default, but if you decide not to install it, you will lose the option to view PDF thumbnails in Windows Explorer.
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.
Clone existing comments by holding down the control key and dragging them to a new location. This currently seems to work with most annotation apart from sticky notes.
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.”
Display of author name and creation date of comments can be disabled in Preferences, Commenting.
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 sensitivity 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 to create your own PDF stamps file. This requires the free Serif™ PagePlus Starter Edition, or PagePlus X4 or later. Edit 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
Adobe Reader, Foxit Reader, and PDF-XChange can all open multiple documents, PDF-XChange is limited to 50 open documents in each instance. Adobe Reader seems to be limited to 50 documents.
To test the speed of loading files from disk, I dragged 50 PDF files totalling 87.4 Mbytes (e-Books from Buddhanet) to the already open PDF viewer from Windows Explorer.
- PDF-XChange 2.5.210 took 12 seconds. Closing took less than 1 second.
- PDF-XChange Editor build 301 took 5 seconds. Closing all took less than 1 second.
- Foxit Reader 6.0.2.0413 took 25 seconds. Closing took 7 seconds.
- Adobe Reader 11.0.3 took 30 seconds. Exit took 4 seconds. There is no Close All command that I could see.
The document Navigation Tabs are on by default, but you can turn them off from the
view menu to save space.
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. Right-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.
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. The tile icon can be moved to any toolbar using the customise dialogue, and a shortcut can be assigned to the command: “Show all opened documents tabs.”
The keyboard can also be used to navigate between open documents, even with the navigation tabs displayed. Ctrl Tab will switch to the next open document, while Ctrl Shift Tab will switch to the previous open document. If the Ctrl Tab key is held down for a second, a window pops up showing the document tab thumbnails, letting you preview all of the opened documents to select the right one.
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: roll the mouse pointer over it to view the other half.
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.
Right-click on any toolbar to open the customise dialogue. Select the commands tab to edit the shortcuts. Select any command to edit its properties. The dialogue will show a warning if its already assigned to another command.
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. The menus are on the same toolbar. The Launch toolbar is floating in the corner.
Customize UI
The page background and the application workspace can be customised in Preferences, Customize UI.
Select different fonts for menus and toolbars, and for dialogues.
Choose a sensible size for the dialogue font or your dialogues may grow bigger than the window.
Choose patterns and colours for workspace backgrounds, select colours for tabs and toolbars, for highlighted menus and toolbar icons. Active and enabled tools will show the highlight background colour.
The text and window colours change the appearance of dialogues and toolbar. To change the appearance of the document use the Accessibility options`and override the document colours.
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 image to show all four tiles.
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.
Restore last session. Reopen all files that were previously open in the viewer when
restarting. The setting is on the General Tab of Preferences.
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.
If some recently opened files have been deleted, they can be cleared from the list automatically by checking the option to remove all broken items on startup.
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 Plug-ins
The screen shot 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.
The external PDF-XChange reader 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 plug-in is a neat way of doing this, and with the PDF-XChange plug-in, you still have access to all the comment and markup tools.
The browser plug-in can be customised independently of the stand-alone viewer and the custom settings can be exported/imported from the Edit menu.
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 plug-in on the Launch toolbar. I have detached this toolbar to make it freely floating.
If, for some reason, PDF-XChange doesn’t display a PDF file as expected, you can open it in Adobe Reader.
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.
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.
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.
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%
If you want to use other applications, but keep PDF-XChange open, just 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 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. If you regularly work with large numbers of documents I recommend avoiding Adobe Reader. On my 5-year-old hardware, at least, it is so slow as to be almost unusable.
Review Updated for Build 2.5.210
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 is highly customisable too, so if you don’t like the defaults, many things can be modified.
The installation program is just 20.8 Mbytes and when installed the program takes just 50.7 Mbytes on disk, compared to 96.9 Mbytes for Adobe Reader 9.5 or 110 Mbytes for Adobe Reader 10.
The PDF Help Manual (6.93 Mb) is available as a separate download to reduce the size of the installer.
The developers continue to add new features and fix bugs, releasing regular updates. Their responsiveness to user feedback via the support forum is exemplary. Reported bugs are often fixed in the next release.
You can opt out of installing the Ask Toolbar for Internet Explorer while installing the latest version.
PDF-XChange Editor 3.0 Build 301
This can be used to view and comment on PDF files for free, but editing in the unregistered version will add a watermark. Its not quite a substitute for the free viewer yet, but may be when its feature set is complete. It is well worth downloading to take a look.