Adobe’s popular PDF format makes files look great–at least, when the original material does–and Adobe Reader lets everyone look at the files for free. However, you can’t type or make annotations–those are the province of Adobe’s expensive Acrobat software. Tracker Software’s PDF-Xchange Viewer offers a useful alternative. This attractive, easy-to-use freebie can’t create PDFs, but it lets you monkey with existing ones all you like. It accepts many kinds of markup, from highlighting to circles to sticky notes. The loupe tool magnifies sections for you, letting you get a better look. You can export the product in a number of different forms–including BMP and TIFF–and (of course) you can save it as a PDF.

The program’s interface looks and feels remarkably like Acrobat Reader, but with more command icons along the top. Users who are familiar with viewing PDFs will find this fairly intuitive, but newcomers are advised to experiment with the options and pay attention to the Help file. Viewing PDFs is incredibly simple and should not be a problem for users. The documents look good through the reader and are easily navigated. While the program is good for simply looking at PDFs, it excels with its added features. The control panel along the top displays a long list of options for editing your PDFs. The most useful we found was the option for making bright red shapes and lines, which can be utilized to mark errors and make comments (an element that has always been one of Acrobat’s best tools). Here, XChange Viewer gives users more options than its competition, allowing for more in-depth markups.

You should know from the start that you cannot edit the PDF document, only add notes of your own. Sticky notes can be added to the document, containing date and timestamps as well as the name of the author. The actual sticky icon alerting that a part of the text contains annotations can be selected from the 15 examples available in Properties window (star, check mark, cross, paragraph sign, key, help sign, etc.). For not intruding on the document you can lower its opacity level and change the default bright yellow color.

Cross out text tool will cause all the text to be crossed by a line. The tool does its work at a simple selection of the text you want
to cross out. Opacity and color can be changed if red is not among your preferences or does not suit the page. Underlining works in the exact same way, as well as highlighting.