PDFViewCM - 1.0

This little contextual menu is handy and does exactly what it says it will do.

What is good about this utility? With a simple right-click (or control-click for those with Apple mice) you can view a PDF. it opens PDFs a couple of seconds faster than Preview.app does...and 25 seconds faster than Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0*. It seems completely stable and contains all of the features it claims. With a price tag of $0, it can't be out-priced. The documentation is complete, telling how to install the plug-in by hand and how to use all of the features of the utility itself. And although the installation of a contextual-menu plugin isn't that difficult, it's nice to have the added bonus of an installer script to speed up digging two or three levels deep in your hard drive to install it.

What's missing from this nice little PDF viewer? The only missing things are fairly minor. The documentation, although comprehensive, needs a litle editing for grammar and wording. The only missing feature that I'd like to see is the ability to zoom to fit the screen/window instead of just pre-set percentages.

Since this plugin uses the built-in Quartz PDF rendering engine, it suffers the same problems with displaying newer PDFs or ones with advanced features that Preview.app does. Although I don't know for sure, I'm betting the new engine in Panther will eliminate that problem.

Overall, this is an excellent utiliy that is well worth the download time. It's no Acrobat Reader...but that's a good thing and a bad thing depending on whether your time or your needed features are more important.

* Times based on time starting with dropping of document icon onto application icon for a four-page, text-only PDF on an 800 MHz G4 tower.

Neither PDFViewCM nor Apple's Preview will display form data. The forms appear to be blank. Adobe Reader will display the information.