Mobile PDF

At last I have found a reasonable PDF Reader on the iPod touch ….. and it was there all along …..

Unfortunately so far, all of the third-party PDF viewers for the iPod touch rather suck. MobilePreview still in version 0.1 mentions reading pdfs as a “planned feature”. PDFViewer is too annoying to use, as it scales from the top-left of the document, not the centre of the screen and does not rotate.

The best solution I have found so far is to use MobileSafari, with the ‘file://’ patch applied. I keep a folder of PDFs in ~/Media/PDF/ (which was where PDFViewer expected to find them), I copy them there using AppleFileProtocol, using AFPd (which also turns on Bonjour, nice).

MobileSafari is a far nicer PDF viewer than PDFViewer, but is less convenient because you cannot browse a directory. What you can do though is to type in the URL to your PDF file, eg. file:///var/root/Media/PDF/TubeMap.pdf and when it loads, zoom into a representative part of the image and add it as a WebClip to your home screen.

Happy typing.