How to read PDFs on an iPad using GoodReader

One shift I had to make when moving to an iPhone was the lack of a real file system. Other phones I used like the Nokia N95 or the Sony Ericsson had a tangible file system that you could navigate through, and apps could access directly. The iPhone doesn’t have such a thing. Either apps keep files in their own walled garden, or they have the ability to access music and photos through the shared spaces that Apple allows. With the iPad, there’s no Documents space, and using documents on the iPad is becoming a real hassle.

Apple sold us all on the ability to read books on the iPad, and it’s a great eBook reader, and they also announced the ability to use their Pages app for word processing. I thought that maybe they had fixed the documents problem with a shared space and gave us the ability to read PDFs somehow, but unfortunately that hasn’t been fixed. Out of the box, the only way to read PDFs on the iPad is to mail it to yourself. That’s not a very practical solution since you sometimes delete mail off a central server if you’re using a main computer for it which means you’ll lose your PDF at some point. Also, some mail servers have a size limit. If you use IMAP, you’ll have to download the PDF every time you want to read it. You can’t save the PDF on your iPad which is especially troubling if you want to use different apps to access a single PDF for different reasons such as mailing it to someone, reading it, or simply extracting data from it. The only way you can access a single PDF from multiple apps is to use an app such as Dropbox to access it, but apps would need to incorporate Dropbox support to read those files. Dropbox does read PDFs but it has to read the file from its server every time you want to access it. What that means is, if you have a 31MB PDF file like I do, Dropbox goes out and grabs it which can be slow. Dropbox does not yet have a native iPad app so even if you did manage to load it using the Dropbox app, reading it on the iPad is almost impossible.

Even though Apple didn’t explicitly say it, I was under the impression that their Pages app would read PDFs. I was wrong, it only reads .doc files, and exports PDFs. When you export a PDF using Pages, it’s saved in a “File Sharing” area on the iPad for that app only, and when you sync your iPad, the file is then saved on your Mac or PC. I find this a crude way of doing things, I would think that if we had a central “Documents” space, we’d then have the ability to allow all apps to access document files, not just the apps that are working with the document directly.

The best solution I found was an app called GoodReader. It’s only $0.99 and has a fantastic system for dealing with documents. What it does is allow you to access files from multiple sources: FTP, WebDAV, MobileMe, DropBox, Google Docs, mail servers, box.net, filesanywhere, or MyDisk.se. You an also type in a direct URL for downloading. If you need a document badly enough, there isn’t some way that GoodReader can’t get it. I put a 31MB file on Dropbox, and GoodReader grabbed it fast, and put it in its document list. From there, I was able to see the PDF almost perfectly. It had some minor rendering errors, but they weren’t serious. After the file is read into GoodReader, you can compress it, or send it back out via email. I haven’t found an obvious way to put the file on a different server, such as copying from MobileMe and putting it on a DropBox file system.

Despite how much I love GoodReader, it’s still not the solution I’d like, but it’s inexpensive and works very well. I’m hoping that at some point in the near future, Apple gives us some kind of native file system with folders so that we can manage the files on our iPads a little better.

Tags: delomni, document, dropbox, featured, how-to, iPad, iPhone, ipod touch, MobileMe, reading pdf

Category: Technology