Sumatra pdf reader for Windows is quite small & quite fast. It even has a version that is a single executable which doesn't need any registry entries. http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/download-free-pdf-viewer.html I'm running it right now & it claims only 4 megabytes of virtual memory!! I think that Adobe's splash screen takes more than that. At 06:09 AM 2/5/2012, Joerg Arndt wrote:
[about pdf readers, not what subject suggests]
* Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> [Feb 05. 2012 14:48]:
There are now some free pdf reader apps that are about 1/10th the size of Adobe Reader.
I stopped "upgrading" Adobe Reader a couple of years ago when the download exceeded 100Mbytes.
I have since found out that Adobe "Reader" has all kinds of cr*p that you don't use & can hurt you -- including full Javascript (I think that Javascript is what blew it past 100Mbytes). You don't need or want Javascript for pdf files, because Javascript enables all kinds of bad behavior, including worms, viruses, etc. Javascript is primarily used for filling out forms, which you probably need to do at most 1x per year. The rest of the year, Javascript is a gaping security hole.
[...]
(fully agreed)
You can disable Javascript by renaming some directory in the installation btw. (could not find out what the name is in <=60 secs).
And there is xpdf: executable < 300kB (but loads a couple of dynamic libs). Memory footprint about 13MB on my system:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 16523 jj 20 0 83616 13m 11m T 0 0.1 0:00.05 xpdf
Added extra if you compile it yourself: you can change a single line in the code to ignore if creator forbids printing and/or copy&paste.
acroread used to be better in "repairing" broken pdfs, nowadays it has clearly lost it's lead in this respect.
Still, some documents, notable scanned books from arxiv, take bloody ages (>10secs) to render a single page. Somehow we are losing more performance over time than Moore's law gives us.