How to open PDFs

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Let's make one of our roundup articles to understand how to open PDFs. After telling you about muPDF, Of PDF4Teachers and also of how to scan to PDF with Android we think the time has come to make a small collection of useful applications for opening or editing a PDF.

Obviously if you are on a desktop you can open PDF files with any Browsers. However, this is only a basic option, there are generally no advanced features in it Browsers if not to just read the PDF.

How to open PDFs on desktop

PDF was invented by Adobe in the 1990s ¹. For this reason the main software installed to read it has always been Adobe Acrobat Reader. However, PDF is an open format, so you can create, edit and read PDFs without paying royalties of any kind to Adobe. We generally recommend not using Adobe Acrobat Reader to read PDFs on Windows (nor anywhere else) as their application, in addition to being closed source, is not necessarily the best for reading PDFs.

Sumatra PDF

Open source

A very interesting PDF reader. Lightweight, portable and really fast. It also has some interesting basic features such as the ability to merge two or more PDFs and then create a single one.
Here you can find the official website with documentation and download. It can only be used on Windows and it is of course software Open source ².

Okular

Open source

Its slogan is “more than a reader”, so we immediately understand that we are not dealing with a simple PDF reader. In addition to simply reading PDFs, we can, for example, select and annotate text using multiple tools. This is also a very fast reader and Open source ³. You can also find it available on all platforms. On Windows you can find it directly on Microsoft Store.

QuickLook

Open source

Also for Windows there is also QuickLook (inspired by the homonymous Quick Look present on macOS). Basically you can preview many files by just pressing SPACE. It's really great and fast for quickly reading PDFs without having to open them with specific programs.

Mandatory citations

• PD4Teachers, we have already talked about it in a dedicated article. It is an excellent application that is potentially very useful for teachers;

• PDFSam Basic, one of the most complete applications for editing PDFs. It's a bit the Swiss Army knife of PDFs. AND free And Open source ⁴, allows you to do almost anything and is also multiplatform. You can merge, split and rotate PDFs with disarming simplicity. In the Pro version, for a fee, you can also edit them, protect them, OCR them and much more;

• Foxit Reader, upon your recommendation ⁵ we add this program not Open source but interesting and with many features. You can also disable all telemetry and any online features.

How to open PDFs on Android

There are tons of applications Open source on Android to read PDFs, let's see some of them.

• muPDF, an excellent application to which we have also dedicated an article;

• EBookDroid, an application Open source ⁶ very interesting for reading any type of PDF but also for cataloging and reading ebooks;

• MJ PDF, another fast, lightweight and PDF reader Open source. Available on Play Store come on IzzyOnDroid;
• Secure PDF Viewer, is a very simple PDF reader developed by GrapheneOS (an operating system based on Android and focused on privacy and security). Safe, fast but with few options available;

• Sav PDF Viewer, a new application Open source available on F-Droid through IzzyOnDroid. Very simple but just as fast. Recommended for quickly reading and consulting PDFs on your Android;

• Library Reader, another gorgeous and feature-rich application for reading PDFs and ebooks on Android. AND Open source ⁷ and exists on Google Play in two different versions: Bookstore And Librera PRO, both free. You can also find it on F-Droid.
• PDF Viewer Plus, another interesting application available on both Google Play and F-Droid. Very light and very easy to use, we often recommend it as an alternative to muPDF; Pdf Viewer Plus is no longer maintained ⁸

1. PDF on Wikipedia[↩]
2. Sumatra PDF on GitHub[↩]
3. Okular on GitHub[↩]
4. PDFSam Basic on GitHub[↩]
5. Foxit reporting on Telegram[↩]
6. source code by EBookDroid[↩]
7. Librera Reader on GitHub[↩]
8. source code of PDF Viewer Plus[↩]

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