Someone please tell me a good alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader. It's too big and bloated for just a simple reader that loads faster and doesn't require 20MB of memory.

Ghostgum GSView, which is a postscript reader, can also read PDFs. You need to install Ghostscript as well.

This may help deflate Reader a bit:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11041

ff123

Nice... thanks for the tips.
I'm on Reader 5.1, because I uninstalled Windows Messenger (not the system service), and opening Reader 6 would always reinstall WM. Damn annoying.

I have the full version of Acrobat 6, and I still think it's kind of a clunky way to just open up a damn document. I'll take a look at GSView, but I would still like to be able to use Acrobat for pdf authoring.

In my limited experience, the Adobe reader makes some documents look much nicer on screen than GSView. Print out seems to be similar though.

Removing some plug-ins helps (as the link suggests) - but I'm tempted to downgrade to Acrobat Reader 3 or something, and see what problems this causes. IIRC it was much faster (on a much slower machine).

EDIT: the full version (i.e. "acrobat" rather than "adobe/acrobat reader") is very slow to load. Though with bloating v6 "reader" is as slow as v5 "full". However, of course "reader" is faster to load than "full" for the same version number.

With care, you can make the faster "reader" your reader (!), and only launch the full version when you need to create or edit something. That worked for me for a while, and saves a lot of time.

Cheers,
David.

You might want to try Xpdf, although I've never used it myself to comment on it. It's about 1.1MB.

There are some Latex-generated PDFs, however, that look much better is GSview (=better anti aliased; blame the bitmap fonts). Acrobat is usually scrolling faster though.

I use Acrobat Reader 4; can't remember having any compatibility problem with it.