PDF Software | Office of the Registrar | SIU

Links to Software for Viewing PDF Files

Documents stored as PDF ("Portable Document Format") files require a special viewer in order to open them.  The creator of the PDF format, Adobe Systems, offers their free Adobe Reader software:

• Adobe Reader  (for Windows, MacOS, Linux, mobile devices, and more)

There are other free software options that can be used to view most PDF files.  Their features may not be as complete as those of Adobe Reader – for example, they may not be able to properly display everything in a complex PDF file created by the most recent versions of Adobe's PDF creation software, or they may not be able to allow text entry in a PDF with fillable fields – but they are much smaller in size and many of them can be run from portable devices such as USB flash drives:

• Foxit Reader  (for Windows, Linux, and mobile devices)
• PDF-XChange Viewer  (for Windows)
• Sumatra PDF  (for Windows)
• Cool PDF Reader  (for Windows)
• Evince  (for Windows and Linux)
• Skim PDF Reader  (for MacOS)

More free alternatives to Adobe Reader are listed on this site.  For those who are looking specifically for free software that has been designed using open standards (rather than proprietary ones), a list of such software is on this site.

While most of the PDF documents that you will encounter on our web site can be viewed by any of the above software choices, PDFs that are housed outside of our web site may require you to use Adobe Reader to view them.  For the fillable PDF forms on our web site, you should be able to use at least Adobe Reader, Foxit Reader, and PDF-XChange Viewer to fill out (via the keyboard) and print such completed forms.