PDF Reader X - Edit Adobe PDF for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By NeedNameThatIstTaken

  Excellent

  I've now used it for two months and it's the best PDF reader I've experience for reading academic articles. It's snappy and reminds me of replacing my web browser with Chrome when it first came out. Can easily add native PDF annotations and search through the existing ones. (And it saves them fast when you close the file. Competitors either do this slowly or, like Skim, use a non-native annotation format that can't be read by other PDF readers.) Draggable tabs. Plays nicely with Zotero. The UI for "find" displays a lot of info intuitively. Everything is just well designed. I haven't yet run into a limitation on the free version, and upgrading to pro is only $20 anyways. It used to crash from time to time when it came out in late 2017, but this appears to have been fixed as of Feburary 2018! (That's why I'm upgrading my review from 4 stars to 5 stars.) If there are old reviews complaining about crashes, keep that in mind. I prefer it over these other PDF readers on maxOS that I have tried: FoxIt, Preview, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Skim.

  
  
• By mike//e

  Fast reader, but missing bookmarks and more

  PDF Guru displays pages quickly, eliminating the 1/2 second of blurriness per page that I get with Microsoft's Preview. Unfortuately it's missing some other basic features: It doesn't import bookmarks. It doesn't have a "non-continuous" view for pages, so you can't scroll like you are flipping pages. It has an interesting view that shows thumbnails of all pages, but you can't click on them to navigate to them. It doesn't have a way to turn off layers (some books have background layers that inhibit printing or make the page text harder to read). Pages scaled at 100% are significantly smaller than they should be; it depends on your monitor resolution.

  
  
• By MikeApex

  Pretty Good

  I would consider buying it if I did not read so many reviews about bugs and they had released and Update since for Yosemite. Since the last update was May 2014 it obviously has not been optimized for Yosemite and probably the reason it is buggy. If they want you to pay 15$ then they have to expect to support the product and no updates in 9 months does not cut it.

  
  
• By Z0r06

  Excellent replacement of Windows Preview

  After Windows Preview broke how it displays highlights and comments, I went on a search of a PDF reader that was compatible with standard PDF markup and could display the comments in a sidebar along with their colors. This is the only program I’ve found that fits the bill. PDF Guru does not allow you to *EDIT* the PDFs (e.g., insert or alter text). It’s fantastic, however, for reading and commenting on PDFs.

  
  
• By PhysicsBus

  Excellent

  I've now used it for two months and it's the best PDF reader I've experience for reading academic articles. It's snappy and reminds me of replacing my web browser with Chrome when it first came out. Can easily add native PDF annotations and search through the existing ones. (And it saves them fast when you close the file. Competitors either do this slowly or, like Skim, use a non-native annotation format that can't be read by other PDF readers.) Draggable tabs. Plays nicely with Zotero. The UI for "find" displays a lot of info intuitively. Everything is just well designed. I haven't yet run into a limitation on the free version, and upgrading to pro is only $20 anyways. It used to crash from time to time when it came out in late 2017, but this appears to have been fixed as of Feburary 2018! (That's why I'm upgrading my review from 4 stars to 5 stars.) If there are old reviews complaining about crashes, keep that in mind. I prefer it over these other PDF readers on maxOS that I have tried: FoxIt, Preview, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Skim.

  
  

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