[APP] PDF Viewer update

arpruss · Jul 26, 2011

I needed a PDF viewer for my own purposes, and the closest I could find was Maciej's PDF Viewer (=apv) app on the market. It was open source, and so I made a bunch of changes that I wanted or needed. Anyway, I now have a pre-release for version 0.3.0, which include a bunch of enhancements since Maciej's 0.2.9 release.

Here it is.

New features:
- speed optimizations
- page number display
- options including: full screen, reverse video, various tweaks, page with volume keys
- overhauled file selection: added icons for directories, added home directory option
- better font rendering

arpruss · Jul 27, 2011

Now I posted pre-release 0.3.0 pre 2. Includes a monochrome feature to save memory and a zoom-to-width feature which I think people will find handy.

asifito · Aug 5, 2011

Sounds like you know what your doing. Not had a chance to test your app yet, but does it have the functionality to add bookmarks and highlight text?

DanBroChill · Aug 6, 2011

Gonna try it out now, thanks!

arpruss · Aug 6, 2011

No, there is no annotation, sorry. Just reading.

Hund · Aug 6, 2011

Its really nice with open source alternatives. Im gonna try it out.

trail1091 · Aug 6, 2011

I think i will love this. thanks bud

sark666 · Aug 6, 2011

I haven't tried it yet but it would be great if you could add zoom to a fixed percentage
the reason I want that is some pdfs have huge fonts for the page numbering and while technically fit to width is working, there's still a fair amount of room on the sides. Obviously this should be sticky. A bonus would be it would remember the setting by filename

moav · Aug 6, 2011

Works good, one option I'd love to get is fixed scrolling like with browsers

arpruss · Aug 6, 2011

sark666 said:
I haven't tried it yet but it would be great if you could add zoom to a fixed percentage
the reason I want that is some pdfs have huge fonts for the page numbering and while technically fit to width is working, there's still a fair amount of room on the sides. Obviously this should be sticky. A bonus would be it would remember the setting by filename

Zoom settings are indeed remembered by filename.

You can also adjust how much the zoom buttons zoom by. If you set that to 5% or 10%, you can do zoom-to-width and then press the zoom button once or twice.

Eventually, I'd like it to detect the real edges of the text.

arpruss · Aug 6, 2011

moav said:
Works good, one option I'd love to get is fixed scrolling like with browsers

I couldn't figure out how to implement that. Moreover, I find it's poorly implemented in the browser--it locks much better on my device into horizontal movement than into vertical movement!

Instead, there is a "vertical scroll lock" option. This locks the scrolling to be only vertical, unless you make a serious (1/5 screen width) swipe left or right which temporarily unlocks horizontal scrolling.

germanhoss · Aug 6, 2011

I`ve just tested this app for half an hour with a bunch of PDFs littered in my Desire. This is without exaggeration the best pdf-viewer I´ve seen so far.

Very useful:
- zooming in steps as little as 5% because most PDFs were made for monitors or printing and not smartphones
- inverting the screen for reading at night or low-light conditions. It also saves power on my screen to read white text with black background.
- and it´s FAST

What I miss:

- an option to forget about the layout of a PDF, so I can only get the pure text. This would be very useful for PDFs designed for magazines with a columned layout, which is a pain to read on a handheld computer.

Keep up the good work

arpruss · Aug 6, 2011

germanhoss said:
I`ve just tested this app for half an hour with a bunch of PDFs littered in my Desire. This is without exaggeration the best pdf-viewer I´ve seen so far.

Very useful:
- zooming in steps as little as 5% because most PDFs were made for monitors or printing and not smartphones

Remember, too, that if you set the 5% zoom option, you can still long-touch the zoom buttons for a 2X zoom.

germanhoss · Aug 6, 2011

arpruss said:
Remember, too, that if you set the 5% zoom option, you can still long-touch the zoom buttons for a 2X zoom.

Wow, haven´t noticed that - that´s quite useful.

Originally I thought of requesting a feature to remember the place where I closed the document because I´m used to open things in the ES explorer.
Then I stumbled through the built-in file explorer - feature implemented

Maybe an FAQ or a short manual would be useful ...

arpruss · Aug 6, 2011

germanhoss said:
Wow, haven´t noticed that - that´s quite useful.

Originally I thought of requesting a feature to remember the place where I closed the document because I´m used to open things in the ES explorer.
Then I stumbled through the built-in file explorer - feature implemented

Maybe an FAQ or a short manual would be useful ...

There is a wiki on the project page. You can add a FAQ.

jankoboys6 · Aug 6, 2011

It's a great light app and it has some cool features which I miss on other apps. But my primary feature for PDF readers is smoothness.

It would be great if it would be working as smooth as Documents To Go (their PDF reader). By smooth I mean smooth rendering and scrolling. Also it won't hurt to have multitouch zooming.

I know it's easy to demand and hard to do but at least there are ideas what should be present in the next versions.

arpruss · Aug 6, 2011

jankoboys6 said:
It's a great light app and it has some cool features which I miss on other apps. But my primary feature for PDF readers is smoothness.

It would be great if it would be working as smooth as Documents To Go (their PDF reader). By smooth I mean smooth rendering and scrolling.

That's largely a matter of speed, and it's going to be hard to improve that, except by expending a lot of memory for caching and background rendering.

Also it won't hurt to have multitouch zooming.

I agree, but it is a finicky feature to implement correctly and hence requires a multitouch device for debugging. I don't own one. Moreover, there are potential patent issues.

arpruss · Aug 6, 2011

I've just posted 0.3.0 pre 13. This unfortunately has a new bookmark database, not compatible with previous versions, so people will lose their per-document settings. I am hoping this is the last such loss--the new format will make code maintenance easier and is easily upward expandable.

New features/fixes in pre 13:
- store horizontal offset in per-document settings
- better restore of zoom if orientation has changed
- fix round-off error which resulted in occasional horizontal one-pixel-width errors

jankoboys6 · Aug 6, 2011

I would also like to mention the color feature in your app is really great! Now I can read without hurting my eyes in the dark and it saves batter as well. Great feature indeed!

arpruss said:
That's largely a matter of speed, and it's going to be hard to improve that, except by expending a lot of memory for caching and background rendering.

hmmm what if you make the memory size for caching an option in the settings for users to choose their optimum size? Do you believe that this would make any speed improvements?

arpruss said:
I agree, but it is a finicky feature to implement correctly and hence requires a multitouch device for debugging. I don't own one. Moreover, there are potential patent issues.

I see it's kind a hard/expensive to make this feature possible. Darn US laws on patents :-/ don't know if in EU is the same for Android apps but for C++ and other programming languages, there are no e-patents.

Keep on your great work!

PS: I'm using HTC Desire (CM7 rom)

arpruss · Aug 6, 2011

jankoboys6 said:
I would also like to mention the color feature in your app is really great! Now I can read without hurting my eyes in the dark and it saves batter as well. Great feature indeed!

hmmm what if you make the memory size for caching an option in the settings for users to choose their optimum size? Do you believe that this would make any speed improvements?

Maybe, but it would need a smarter pre-render queue than we currently have. I experimented with making one, but my attempts were buggy so I got rid of them.

Tell me which scrolling pattern you'd like to be faster? Currently the app (in render ahead mode) is optimized for ebook reading: you read a page, and while you read the page, the next one is rendered and shows up instantly when you flip pages (I generally do that with the volume-down key) or scroll vertically to it.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug somewhere, perhaps only on devices with larger screen resolutions (it works fine on my 854x480 Archos, but I am told that it doesn't work on a 1280x960 screen), which makes the next page not show up instantly.

[APP] PDF Viewer update

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