Adobe Labs announced a lightweight PDF reader which they called Adobe Digital Editions (beta). A lightweight PDF reader is a very desired utility given the widespread use of the PDF format and the resource intensiveness of the Adobe Reader. I had written about my choice of alternative lightweight PDF reader called Foxit before. So, I went ahead and immediately downloaded and installed the application which was only 2.5 MB including the Flash Player 9. As the inclusion of the flash player hints, we are talking about a flash application from Adobe. The reader comes up definitely faster than the Adobe Reader and it looks sleek with its all black interface.
Adobe brings a notion of Library with the PDF files and lists them pretty neatly inside the application in different views. Clicking on an item quickly brings up the reading view. It is possible to Fit the Width, Fit Single Page or Fit Double Pages. I have to say the reading view looks pretty sleek as well. Zooming is possible with Closer Look where different parts of a PDF file can be zoomed in.
As it is called lightweight, of course an inspection of the memory usage is in order. As I am writing this with the application open, I see that it uses about 60K of memory with only one file open and just two files in the library. I am not sure if this is lightweight when it comes to resource usage.
Foxit reader with a larger PDF file uses about 9K of memory as opposed to the 60K of the Digital Editions. Nevertheless, the opening and closing of the Digital Editions is pretty fast and I did not observe any hang ups or extreme CPU usage. It will be interesting to see how this beta will evolve. It is definitely interesting to see Adobe bring Flash to the desktop. As of now, the digital editions is merely a reader, a stripped down version of the Adobe reader, and does not have any functionality of selecting, copying text or images. It is not even possible to print a file in this beta version.
On a final note, I observe that the digital editions is targeted for e-book reading. A user like me who mostly reads academic publications in PDF format will do better with the Foxit reader.
[tags] technology, review, software, adobe, pdf[/tags]
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