I came across this little application a while ago, I was having some conflict issues between the Adobe Acrobat Reader I was using (version 8.0) and the Adobe Acrobat Distiller that creates the PDFs (version 5). They just wouldn’t talk with eachother nicely, especially when it came to viewing a PDF file through the web. I’ve found Adobes Acrobat software to become very bloated in the last few years, from a few meg to download a reader. To now 30mb, and now for the whole suit to create, read and edit is roughly 300mb. It’s just to big for something I only use when I need it. So I uninstalled and went in search of some freeware applications to create and view PDF files.

I’m now using FoxIT Reader to view my PDF files on both my desktop and in Firefox. I’ve also downloaded and installed a program called CutePDF to create my PDF files when I need to. It’s a great little application, it works on both Windows Vista and XP, it’s free for home, education and government uses. There are no watermarks across your PDFs either, and comes with all the usual options you need for creating a PDF. It installs itself as a printer, so it appears under “Printers and Faxes” in Windows XP. It also installs a PostScript to PDF file as well but its only a few kb’s and you don’t see it anywhere in your system.