[COFF] Re: Reading PDFs on a mobile. (Was: Requesting thoughts on extended regular expressions in grep.)

[Michael Parson <mparson@bl.org>]

On Sat, 4 Mar 2023, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

> Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2023 04:15:33
> From: Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk>
> To: coff@tuhs.org
> Subject: [COFF] Reading PDFs on a mobile. (Was: Requesting thoughts on
>     extended regular expressions in grep.)
> 
> Hi,
>
> Grant wrote:
>> Even inventorying and keeping track of the books can be time
>> consuming. -- Thankfully I took some time to do exactly that and have
>> access to that information on the super computer in my pocket.
>
> I seek recommendations for an Android app to comfortably read PDFs on
> a mobile phone's screen.  They were intended to be printed as a book.
> In particular, once I've zoomed and panned to get the interesting part
> of a page as large as possible, swiping between pages should persist
> that view.  An extra point for allowing odd and even pages to use
> different panning.

Sorry for responding to an old thread got behind on my list-mail
reading, but I wanted to share my $.02.

Someone else mentioned an e-book reader app, and I second that,
mostly...Moon+ Reader on Android is the e-book reader I've been using
for a while and it does a good job with standard e-book formats
as well as PDF files, IF the PDF is a PDF of formatted text.  It
even has a mode where it will do a pretty decent job of on-the-fly
converting/reformatting the text of the PDF to something that can
actually be read on a small (phone) screen.  However, if the PDF is just
a bunch of 1 image per page wrapped in a PDF container, you're out of
luck and back to zoom/pan around the page.

For most of my digtal book reading these days, I use a Boox e-ink
reader.  It runs Android, so, I can use the same e-book reader I used
on my phone.  It can even sync where you're at in the book/document via
dropbox and you can move between multiple devices if needed.

If I want to mark-up the PDF, the built-in stuff on the Boox handles
that nicely.  If I'm on my phone, I use an app called Xodo.

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX