Vista-native PDF a la XPS?

I’d like to run a pdf viewer that:

  1. isn’t Acrobat
  2. uses Vistas WPF

An XPS converter would probably be an alternative. I have been spoiled by OSX, and I’m not keen on Acrobat or the usual mini-pdf-viewers common as Acrobat replacements.

Do you get PDF viewing capabilities if you install Office and a PDF plugin? Does it have to launch with some massive viewer app, or is it a nice lightweight thing?

Why would you want to use WPF for viewing PDFs? WPF is not specific to Vista, by the way.

edit: Do you mean you want to view PDFs in a browser or something, like XPS documents? Just use Acrobat Reader. It’s effectively no different, the XPS viewer pulls in a lot of libraries too (from .NET 3.5), it’s not a lightweight viewer built into the OS or anything. Acrobat Reader is much more powerful than the current XPS viewer, and it’s also guaranteed (or at least much more likely) to show PDF documents correctly. No simple XPS conversion will give you a proper representation of embedded PostScript, for starters.

PDF is based on PostScript and I believe the OS-X screen renderer is based on Display PostScript, that’s why they can do a fast & accurate PDF viewer within the OS. With Windows this is basically impossible because there’s no PostScript display core. A translation is always necessary, and any translation that’s significantly more lightweight than Acrobat is going to run into some glitches sooner or later.

So really… just use Acrobat Reader.

The continent of Australia is significantly more leightweight than current incarnations of Acrobat, which I presume is the problem being addressed here. Since about version 7 or so, Acrobat (and especially the reader) has bulked up to ridiculous degrees. It now takes forever to start, to load a file, and to simply use for its primary purpose as a lightweight display agent for electronic paper.

I don’t know much about WPF, but I like to use Sumatra PDF for viewing. Very lightweight and renders quite well.

I don’t know on what kind of CP/M-80 machine you guys are trying to run Acrobat, but the full version of Acrobat Professional does a warm start in about one second on my system. Loading a file into an open Acrobat window is much faster still. And my system is not top-of-the-line, either, just a quaint non-overclocked Core 2 Duo E6600.

yeah I don’t get the WPF requirement but I like this one:

Acrobat Reader has always had a clunky, awful UI and been bloated and slow. I currently use Foxit Reader, which is great. I don’t think it’ll do certain advanced PDF features, but I don’t run into PDFs that use those pretty much ever.