[Lowerbounds, Upperbounds]

Given the amount of documents that I deal with, I’ve had many opportunities to save paper if only I could annotating on a PDF directly. Until recently, Jarnal has been the only free solution on Windows. However, I would say that Jarnal is not exactly the most polished piece of software I have used… (But I am not complaining against its price.)

Well, Jarnal has some serious competition now. PDF-XChange Viewer is a free (as in beer) PDF viewer that supports a full suite of native PDF annotation capabilities. By “native”, I mean if you insert a “sticky note” comment into the PDF, it shows up as a sticky note in Adobe Reader and so you can open, close and move the note, just like the stickies created by Acrobat Professional. In comparison, the interface is not very customizable and the keyboard shortcuts are not quite “there” yet, but it is certainly looking very good for a version-1 product. The font rendering is not as good as well, but it is comparable to other free solutions. Its performance on graphics intensive PDF is very good on too! There is even a button that allows you to quickly open the current PDF using Adobe Reader, just in case.

I wish it has better ink support, but again, I am not complaining against its price.

P.S. Not that I really want to destroy any sales, but I note that PDFCreator is a very good Distiller replacement. Together with PDF-XChange Viewer, they cover most of my PDF needs.