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WOiP Tip - View PDFs On An iPhone With Ease
Sometimes the best iPhone applications aren't iPhone applications at all. This is a good example.
Now that it is possible to transfer, carry, and view PDF files on an iPhone or iPod Touch I carry a reference library worth of PDF's with me everywhere. No, it isn't the easiest viewing I've experienced, nor is navigation a large PDF's pretty, but it does work and I like knowing that, in a pinch, I have access to some of the more important resource material I use.
One trick that's been rather useful as been using a little Mac application called PDFShrink. back in October I wrote a post about how much easier it is to load and navigate PDFs once they've been reduced in size by the application.
That was nice -- this is better.
An update to the application has now added a setting for reducing PDF files to "iPhone rendered" documents. It now makes the entire file, including images, were easily viewed on the handheld devices.
It took a 3.8MB PDF file and reduced it to just under 500KB. Not only does the handheld handle the files more easily due to the reduction in size, but both images and text remained sharp and easy to read.
My entire library of PDFs is currently undergoing a similar weight loss. If you use a Mac and carry PDF files on your iPhone or Touch the $35 cost of the app is well worth it. PDFShrink is available HERE. A free trial is available.
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The only problem with PDFShrink is the price - unfortunately I just have a really hard time with justifying $35 for an application with a singular purpose like this ... especially just for the convenience of downsizing my PDFs. If it was half this price then maybe...
Firstly I'll say I haven't tried any of the following but it is on my todo list to see how it functions. Being on Windows (sadly) I don't have the option of the app you mention.
I have heard that big 100+ page PDFs are really poor on the device and it tends to choke and no application can handle that very well which lead me to think about other ideas.
Another option is to convert the PDF to a series of JPGs ( I did a quick Google and found a lot of apps that could do this - how good any of them are I can't say ) and then have those on the phone and view them using something like TextGuru or AirShairing. An interesting idea is to them convert those to a comic book format using the idea at this site: www.ipodtouchfans.com/forums/showthread.php and use an iComic reader.
Another problem I found was that I couldn't search PDFs (not that the idea above would allow that either) - I don't know if this is a general thing or just the application I was using to view the file. That would be a must have for me when I get to using something more seriously, I just need to investigate a bit more. I have in the past used a PDF to TXT converter which could be one way to have the text searchable on the device, but it wouldn't be an all in one solution. Do you have something that searches PDFs?
I'll post something when I have looked into this a bit more
Thanks for the tip! That is great to know. Yet another great use for our phones!