The software can be a little intimidating at first, but it’s relatively straightforward to navigate. The only thing that’s lacking in the free version is support for optical character recognition in scanned documents. Or, you can scan a document or image and turn it into a PDF using Foxit Reader. Integration with Microsoft Office allows you to easily turn documents you’re working on into PDFs. There’s even a text-to-speech mode that will read documents out loud for you.įoxit PDF Reader is more than just a free PDF reader – you can also create PDFs from scratch using this software. It allows you to highlight text, add comments, and fill and sign forms.

The layout arranges individual documents in a tab view, so it feels a lot like the experience you’d get looking through PDFs in your web browser.Īcrobat Reader DC includes just about all the annotation tools you could want, making this hands down the best free PDF reader.

That means you can read through and annotate thick documents in this program without worrying that it will crash on you. What really sets this free PDF reader apart is that it can handle opening multiple large files at once. Alternatively, you can save PDFs to or open them from cloud services including Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Box. If you already use other Adobe products, you can connect Acrobat Reader DC to Adobe’s storage cloud. Īdobe’s free PDF reader isn’t the most lightweight download, but this software does a lot of things well. For more flexibility, take a look at our guide to the best free PDF editors, which make editing a PDF as straightforward as tweaking a Word document.Īdditionally, we've featured the best PDF to PowerPoint converters. These should see you through advanced tasks like signing or editing documents, combining PDF files, or converting between document formats. To help you find the best one for what you need, we’ve highlighted five of the best free PDF readers for Windows and Mac. Luckily, the best free PDF readers out there are just as capable as their paid counterparts, and they won’t cost you a dime or force you into a monthly subscription.

While simply opening a PDF as a read-only file is straightforward – you can just do it using your favorite web browser – editing, altering or converting one will require a dedicated PDF reader. And, so everybody uses them at work, in schools, and even for digital copies of the manuals for your peripherals and devices. That’s because they can be opened on any opening system, are easy to attach to an email or a website, and have the advantage of not being easily altered. These days, PDF documents are being used everywhere.

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