Opens your PDF documents, displays their content and sets bookmarks, adds comments, validates signatures and embeds text-to-speech support. The tool also includes security features, such as the ability to automatically stop JavaScripts from executing their code or to prevent URLs from being accessed directly from the PDF.
Though originally devised as a closed file for printing houses, PDF files are now not only ubiquitous but also the most popular format for exchanging information in a secure yet flexible way. As one of the most popular free PDF tools, Foxit Reader is all you’ll need to view, read, and annotate any PDF document securely and effectively, and sign and share your own PDFs just as safely.
The program is both simple and intuitive, especially if you are already familiar with the ribbon design present in all Office tools. The look and feel of the program’s interface and its ribbon will immediately remind you of the latest versions of Word or Excel, thus reducing the interface’s learning curve to a minimum.
You will find basic viewing options, such as the fit-to-page feature, the “zoom lens”, the rotation tool, and – and this is a feature you won’t come across with very often – a “reflow” option. This feature breaks the PDF’s fixed layout principle and performs a temporary transformation of your document into a text-based file that the program’s viewer can reflow according to your needs. This can make an excellent accessibility tool for those who find it difficult to read PDF files with small-sized fonts and long fixed lines.
Not being an editing tool per se (Foxit has a specific tool for that), you won’t find many features to help you “alter” the content of a PDF file. What the program offers you in this department is the capability to insert new text and images anywhere in the page, though always on top of the existing text and images. This is really useful to create margin annotations or comments close to (or on top of) pictures, though you also have a specific tool to annotate images. Also, you can highlight text in any color and add as many bookmarks as you wish anywhere in the document.
When it comes to signing and protecting your PDF files, Foxit Reader allows you to use your handwritten signature or make use of eSignature to verify digital ones. AIP decryption and encryption are also available, even if the file is on a SharePoint server, as the whole tool seamlessly works with Microsoft specifications and protocols.
Foxit Reader is an excellent tool to have installed on all your devices and thus make the most of your PDF documents regardless of where you are. It is everything you’ll ever need to view, read, customize, and share your PDFs securely.
v10.0 [Dec 23, 2011]
New Features and Improvements in Foxit Reader 10.0.0.35798:
- Fill & Sign.
- Fill & Sign provides a convenient workflow of filling flat forms (i.e. non-interactive) and quick signing by typing or drawing your signature, or using an image. With the Fill & Sign tools, you can add text and other symbols anywhere on a flat form.
- Better support for 4K and other high-resolution displays.
- Automatically search all instances of a text string and then highlight them.
- More preference options for Advanced Search.
- A new option to make subsequent searches faster by storing a cache of information from PDF files that you search.
- Support proximity searching, which searches for two or more words that are separated by no more than a certain number of words. The feature is useful when you are looking for concepts that might be expressed by multiple different phrases.
- More advanced options allow you to find words that share the same word stem of the specified search word, or ignore Asian character width, diacritics, and accents.
- Display all comments in a desired font for better accessibility.
- Users can choose the desired font and font size for all comments in all documents they read, overriding the document’s settings.
- Additional GPO settings for enterprise administration (MSI package only).
- New capabilities include locking down some additional settings, such as default PDF viewer and ability to create self-signed digital IDs.
- More JavaScript support for complex form workflows.
- Support for using, not creating, the new form fields in PhantomPDF 10.
- Field type support includes barcode, date, and image form fields.
- Multiple enhancements to bookmark editing and reading.
- Multiple enhancements to tag reading.
- Support Hindi Digits to allow you to input numbers in Hindi.
- Foxit Update Server (a separately orderable cloud-based service) provides IT the ability to better manage and automate the software upgrade process and to ensure users upgrade to the exact release that IT has tested, without having to access an external server.
- Automatically download updates from Foxit servers and make them available on a local network.
- Automatically approve updates for users to download, or restrict users to only download approved updates.
- Set times when all users, or specific users/groups, can download updates.
- Push updates to users, requiring them to install them.
Issues Addressed in Foxit Reader 10.0.0.35798:
- Fixed some stability issues.
- PDF creation is not available in Foxit Reader 10.0.
