Foxit Reader 1.1 is an incredible little PDF viewer that features some powerful tools while remaining pretty damn quick. It’s free for non-commercial usage and features most of the viewing tools you’ve come to expect from the big daddy of PDF readers, namely Adobe Acrobat. Among these tools included in Foxit is the standard zoom functionality, full document navigation, bookmarks, thumbnails, text selection, snapshot image grabbing as well as the old faithful, full screen document viewing.
The download .deb package weighs in at a handy 3.6 MB and when running, has a claimed memory consumption that remains less than 15 MB. It launches instantly when called and can load a PDF document in under 3 seconds.
And installing it in Ubuntu is an absolute breeze.
First, download the .deb package of Foxit’s official download page at http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/desklinux/download.html. Once it is downloaded to the appropriate folder on your system, install it using the dpkg Debian package manager. To do this run a terminal in administrator mode and call:
sudo dpkg -i FoxitReader_1.1.0_i386.deb
And that’s it really. Foxit will be installed on your system and you’ll see the menu shortcut being added under the Office tab on the Applications main menu. It is also added as a right-click context menu selection for PDF files. Couldn’t be simpler and works like an absolute charm! :)
(Oh, and finally, for the future when you might find something even better, you can uninstall it in the usual way using: dpkg -r FoxitReader)
Related Link: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/desklinux/index.html