November 11, 2008

Viewing PDFs on your mobile device

Original Post from January 21st 2008.

PDFZone has this article on software for reading PDF and other document formats (Word, PowerPoint etc) on mobile devices based on Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian and Blackberry.

However, I don't see any surprises in terms of functionality and the problem remains of the small display size of the mobile devices combined with the "printed page layout" mentality (or benefit, depending on your point of view) of most PDF documents, making viewing them on a small screen a pain.

Until the production of PDF documents changes to use PDF's newer tagging capabilities to allow re-flowing of the document as intended by the author/producer OR someone comes up with a smart re-flowing solution that "just works" we seem doomed to use either larger screens or "pan and zoom".

Pointers to good tools for re-flow are appreciated, so please add them in comments and I will follow them up.

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