PDF XChange Viewer

Description

I have to begin this with a confession that will date me. I first installed PDF XChange Viewer some time around 2010 because Adobe Reader had become so bloated that opening a two page invoice took longer than reading it. A coworker sent me a link to this obscure free PDF viewer from a company called Tracker Software based in the UK, and I remember thinking the name sounded like a knockoff. Within an hour of using it I uninstalled Adobe Reader and never went back. That was more than fifteen years ago and I still have a version of the successor product on every machine I own.

Here is the thing you need to know upfront: PDF XChange Viewer has been officially discontinued since 2018. Tracker Software replaced it with PDF-XChange Editor, which is the actively developed product. The old Viewer is still available for download on their website, and it still works on modern Windows, but it is no longer receiving updates or security patches. If you are reading this trying to decide if you should install the Viewer in 2026 — don’t. Install the Editor instead. It does everything the Viewer did plus a lot more, and the free version is really generous with features. But I want to talk about the Viewer first because it got a reputation that the Editor inherited, and understanding why people loved it explains a lot about what makes the whole product line worth paying attention to.

PDF XChange Viewer was fast. Not fast in the way that software marketing always claims everything is fast. I mean you double clicked on a 200 page technical manual and it opened in less than a second when Adobe Reader was still showing you a splash screen. The memory footprint was miniscule. It ran on machines that had no business running anything smoothly. I used it on an ancient Lenovo ThinkPad with 2 GB of RAM and Windows XP, and it handled multi-hundred page engineering drawings without stuttering. It supported tabbed viewing before most PDF readers figured out that people might want to open more than one document at a time. And the annotation tools — highlighting, sticky notes, text boxes, stamps, strikethrough, drawing tools — were all free and worked exactly as you would expect, which was remarkable in an era when Adobe charged money for the privilege of highlighting text in a PDF.

PDF XChange Viewer also had a typewriter tool that allowed you to click anywhere on a document and begin typing. I used this all the time for filling out PDF forms that were not actually fillable — which in my experience was about 90 percent of the forms anyone ever sent me. Government paperwork, vendor agreements, internal HR documents that somebody had scanned and emailed as a flat PDF. Instead of printing them, writing them by hand, and then scanning them back, I would just type right on the page. It wasn’t elegant, and lining up text with the form fields required some eyeballing, but it saved me from the print-sign-scan cycle that I genuinely believe has stolen years of collective human productivity.

Now, PDF-XChange Editor picked up where the Viewer left off, and went much further. The free version includes viewing, annotation, OCR in multiple languages, page extraction and deletion, document comparison, and the ability to embed images and text. That is more than what many paid PDF tools offer. The paid Editor license is $56 for a perpetual single-user license with one year of updates. The Editor Plus is $72 and includes interactive form creation and some advanced features. The Pro bundle, which includes PDF-XChange Standard and PDF-Tools in addition to the Editor Plus, costs $121. All of these are one-off purchases, not subscriptions, which in 2026 seems almost rebellious.

The interface resembles a Microsoft Office ribbon circa 2012. It is functional and logically organized, but it will not win any design awards. There are a dozen tabs across the top, each of them crammed with buttons, and the first time you open it you may feel overwhelmed. I got used to it within a day, but I have spoken to people who bounced off of it because it looked too dense compared to the minimalism of something like Foxit or even the modern Adobe Reader. Tracker Software clearly prioritized feature density over aesthetic simplicity, and depending on your personality type that is either exactly what you want or deeply off-putting.

Text editing in the Editor is functional but has quirks. You can click into paragraphs and change text, change fonts, change sizing. It works well on PDFs that were created digitally. On scanned documents or PDFs with unusual encoding, it sometimes struggles — font detection gets inconsistent, and I have had cases where changing one word in a paragraph caused the line spacing to shift in a way that looked wrong. For heavy text editing, you are still better off converting to Word first and editing there. But for quick fixes – correcting a typo, updating a date, swapping a name — it handles the job without requiring an Adobe subscription.

The OCR engine is particularly worthy of praise. It supports more than 100 languages and does a decent job of converting scanned pages into searchable, selectable text. I ran it on a batch of scanned receipts last year for tax purposes and the accuracy was high enough that I only had to manually correct a handful of characters. It is not as polished as ABBYY FineReader’s OCR, but it is included free in a PDF editor, which makes the comparison almost unfair.

One legitimate complaint I have is that the free version puts a small watermark on documents if you use any of the paid-only features. The watermark is clearly marked and the software warns you before saving, so it is not deceptive. But if you accidentally use a Pro feature without realizing it — which is easy to do because the interface does not always make the distinction obvious — you might save a document, send it to a client, and only then notice a watermark in the corner. It happened to me once with a marked up construction drawing and explaining that to the project manager was not a fun conversation.

If you are looking for a PDF tool that does not require a monthly subscription, is light on resources and offers you much more than most free options, PDF-XChange Editor is one of the best options on Windows. It does not exist on Mac or Linux natively, which is a real limitation if you work across platforms. But on Windows, it has been my default PDF application for going on sixteen years in one form or another, and nothing I have tried since has given me a reason to switch.