We reviewed the document viewer TextMaker Viewer 2009 a while ago. It was a program that could display the contents of various document formats like the popular pdf, txt and doc formats but also newer formats used by Microsoft Office 2007 and the latest version of Open Office. While it did provide a nice way to open all of these formats without having to install an Office suite it lacked behind in usability and more importantly speed.
Universal Viewer is another application that will suite many more needs. It has not only been designed to open document formats but also other formats like images and photos, multimedia files like videos or audio and Internet files like htm or xml. The program is driven by plugins that add support for various file types. The plugins are the same that are used by Total Commander which ensures the availability of many plugins for various file formats.
Universal Viewer is a viewer that displays the information in a basic but highly accessible fashion. Only the main information are shown without additional formatting. Take a look at a comparison between the same document in Microsoft Word 2007 and Universal Viewer:
Universal Viewer is therefor a basic viewer that can display pretty much any format that can be displayed visually. It comes with the following feature set:
- Full support for Unicode filenames
- Built-in functions of several popular plugins: images, multimedia, webpages view
- Support for multiple codepages: ANSI, OEM, EBCDIC, ISO, KOI8, Mac etc.
- Toolbar, status bar, other interface improvements
- Auto-reloading of file on changing, “Follow tail” option
- Displaying of line numbers
- Displaying of non-printable characters
- Combined Unicode/Hex mode (call Unicode mode twice)
- More modern RegEx search library
- Print preview
- EXIF viewer
Some of the more commonly used plugins, for example to display Microsoft Office 2007 documents are linked from the developers homepage directly while others can be found on Total Commander plugin websites which are also linked there. Plugins can be added directly from within Universal Viewer.
Universal Viewer itself can be downloaded as a portable version or installer. The developer offers a Pro version of the viewer as well which adds several new features to the application.
Verdict:
Universal Viewer is a fast and lightweight document viewer that can be used to quickly look at the contents of virtually any files on the computer system.
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Universal Extractor
Main viewer for me. It’s very fast and eats enough formats to be default choice.
Especially good for large text files when I only need to skim without editing.
This is a great find, Martin. Nice to have on the flash drive. Thanks.
thank your post i love portable version