HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you read long PDFs?

82 points by jvilalta ↗ HN
I tend to prefer to read PDF files on a regular monitor, but moving up and down a page is wonky and most readers don't save your place on the document. Also, sometimes the font is too small when you fit to page and fit to width suffers from paging up and down that doesn't take into account the last visible line.

I'd like to hear what you do to read long PDF files, like one of the Springer textbooks. Do you use any readers that support bookmarking and/or note taking and sane pagination? I'm wondering if there is a reader that offers an experience comparable to the experience of reading an ebook on a device like a kindle.

110 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] thread
Rerarom
This is why I bought a Kindle Fire. That is the only reason I needed a tablet which is why I postponed it for several years. And indeed this is the only thing I use it for.
andromeduck
The Sony Digital Paper and Ratta Supernote series also worth checking out. Remarkable is another option but the UX/HCI is horrible.
eigenvalue
Best I’ve found is to read PDFs on an iPad Pro using an app such as IAnnotate. Instead of scrolling, I display one page at a time in portrait orientation, and then you can swipe to flip the pages. Highlighting, underlining, and short notes are quick andeasy. You can keep all the documents in Dropbox for convenient synchronizing of notes.
aasasd
A great illustration of how, to read PDFs, you need a letter-size medium (14", usually portrait).

Anyone reading PDFs on a regular monitor should ask themselves why they're putting a portrait peg in a landscape hole.

qplex
Anyone reading or creating PDFs to begin with should ask why even bother with such a static and outdated format that was made for when it was common to print out documents on paper to read them.
Veen
They can waste a couple of minutes wondering that. Then they can get on with reading the document in the form in which it’s available or creating a document in the form mandated by the publisher or editor.
FakeRemore
I'm not sure what the alternative is supposed to be. ePub is reflowable, fine, but it absolutely chokes on placing images. At least with PDF's, I get the book in a form that was designed by a human being to be read by a human being.
app4soft
> ePub is reflowable, fine, but it absolutely chokes on placing images.

To be honest, ePub is based on HTML5 markup.

So, you could place image in right place in your ePub book in same way as you place images on your website.

FakeRemore
> So, you could place image in right place in your ePub book in same way as you place images on your website.

I've never seen an ePub with images where it looked anywhere as good as the PDF version. It's generally a mess.

diehunde
Agree. Also the code snippets are mess sometimes too.
aasasd
What particular image placing complexity do you need? And why?
FakeRemore
I read a fuckton of papers and non-fiction literature with images. ePub simply isn't useable in these cases. If I'm reading something with no images or graphs or anything, then fine. I'll use ePub, otherwise, no.
aasasd
Alas this doesn't answer my question in any way.
FakeRemore
It does, actually. No ePub I've seen places the images in between text in a satisfying way. PDF's are designed in a certain layout to account for images and keep that design no matter what I'm viewing it on.
[dead] aasasd
Your comments are like an old Russian joke that can be very approximately translated as such:

— Oranges are better than bananas!

— But how? How are they better?!

— Better than bananas!

[dead] FakeRemore
How is that helpful? Go bother somebody else. You obviously don't read many PDF textbooks or you wouldn't be treating me so rudely.
Tagbert
How are those images supposed to be placed? In what way do ePub documents not match this?

Looking for specific complaints, please

phaus
He's talking about it from the perspective of a user of an ebook reading app. He might not know what the problem is. The point is he shouldn't have to know or care what the technical issue is. He's trying to read a paper and when he reads an epub version it usually looks like shit.

This is a usability issue. It might be possible to make properly formatted epubs. However, from his experience most authors aren't making properly formatted epubs, so using epub isn't an option for him.

I've experienced the same quality issue with Epubs. It has been probably 5 years since I've tried reading one, so maybe they have gotten better. Can you give an example of a freely available Epub with proper image placement?

I think part of the issue is that people subconsciously expect ebooks to look like they would expect print books to look. That's not all nostalgia. One of the reasons print books are formatted the way they are is because over centuries of tweaking designs people figured out a near optimal way to present a combination of images and text. You could create print books that mimic the look of the average reflowed EPUB text, but it would look terrible because it doesn't benefit from having an intelligently designed layout.

aasasd
> Can you give an example of a freely available Epub with proper image placement?

My telepathy isn't so good today, so I'm still not getting the signal on what ‘proper’ means here, and thus the example isn't coming. Maybe tomorrow, I guess, if the chakras clean up or something.

phaus
You're clearly either not interested in or not capable of taking part in a conversation where you aren't needlessly condescending so tomorrow you can save yourself the effort.
mattkrause
Functional and aesthetically pleasing? It's one of those "you'll know it when you see it" things, but grab any decently typeset book or paper.

The illustrations, diagrams, and tables are the right size and shape to ensure the details are legible, without wasting a ton of space. They are placed at pertinent locations in the text, usually near the first or major mention of related topic. There's a nice boundary between the text and illustration, so you can tell which is which (again, without wasting a ton of space). If there are multiple illustrations, they're laid out in a sensible way so that one or two lines of text don't appear--and get lost--between them.

aasasd
I was hoping to see an example that is a problem for HTML. What you list, I see on most decent websites—and these features depend on the author and designer's sense, not on the possibilities of PDF. In fact, I encounter more issues when people are trying to be too clever, e.g. by floating images to sides; and no issues when images are kept like paragraphs of text, in the main flow—the one which is reformatted to the screens of different devices.

The most difficult of your criteria is ‘the right size’, mostly because of varying screen dimensions and viewing distances. It's not a problem on desktop, though, and having this issue on a phone is possible only because HTML is reflowable to the screen size in the first place. Moreover, HTML can do things that are verboten and unthinkable in PDF: having an individual image zoomed in and panned without the rest of the page moving away (most sites stop at screen-size ‘lightboxes’ so far, but I'm thinking of slapping together an extension that would instead do the full zoom-around thing on any page).

Overall, it sounds like the same old tradeoff of whether you want to do glamour-magazine-style fancy hijinks with your images, or you want to be able to read the documents on smaller screens and devices. And I know which one I choose.

mattkrause
You're thinking about this too technically.

As an engineer, I am totally willing to believe that the EPub format itself is capable of producing gorgeous, reflowable documents that would knock Edward Tufte's socks off with their design. As a reader though, I've also been disappointed. I don't really care that a book could have been authored better. I want nicely rendered math and I don't want random

line brea

ks

and other ug-li-ness that makes me squint and scroll.

One reliable way to avoid that is to just get a PDF instead. This may be a historical accident. The PDF formatting is probably closer to the print layout, which is most publishers' core competency. Maybe the tools are better, or the layout staff are just better trained on them. Maybe it's the reader, rather than the document. Regardless, I'm going to be reading it on something paper-shaped (and often, sized) so it's barely even a tradeoff.

aasasd
I'm thinking technically because I want PDF out and HTML/epub in. If authors or publishers have trouble with producing HTML/epub, I'd like to hear about that too. Ironically, when I had surprises with amateur-made epubs of e.g. SICP, alternative releases in actual HTML were better.

(Btw, I'm told that PDFs of Tufte suck and the only way to read him is on paper.)

> I'm going to be reading it on something paper-shaped (and often, sized) so it's barely even a tradeoff

Just as I wrote at the beginning of the thread: “buy a special device to read this format”.

funcDropShadow
I usually display 2 pages of a pdf in a non-continuous scrolling mode on one large landscape monitor. I.e. it looks like an open book with a left and right side.
rwoerz
Except for the odd pages being on the left in every reader I know. If you print it out double sided, odd pages are on the right. This is particularly annoying if an author places figures and accompanying text on the same double side.
aasasd
Foxit on Mac has an option in the ‘View’ menu to have the first page on its own.
rwoerz
Thanks. I've just discovered it in Adobe Acrobat too (View / Page Display / Show Cover Page in Two Page View). I was looking for that in Edit / Settings for all the years :)
phaus
Unless you're on a laptop most people have a monitor large enough to put the PDF reader on one half, effectively putting it into portrait mode. I mostly read technical books, so I'll have a terminal or something open on the other half so I can work through the exercises in the book on the same monitor.

When I'm not working at a computer, I do prefer using my Ipad Pro for PDFs.

kristopolous
i've been pretty happy with foxit mobile pdf on android. on linux evince seems to do just about everything i want.
beckingz
Edge browser.
benrbray
Due to the built-in OneNote support, Edge is my go-to for PDFs! It also doesn't suffer from Chrome's limitation for the number of PDFs that can be open at once. Edge enables my questionable habit of depth-first reading :)

I tried new Chromium-based Edge and the new PDF experience is significantly worse imo. I downgraded and will stick with classic Edge as long as I can.

jay-aye-see-key
If you like keyboard centred applications I can't recommend zathura enough, visually it's very minimal with no buttons, definitely not everyone's style.

It supports vim like marks, and powerful movements to manage a lot of pages in a reasonably sane way. My favourite feature is it maintains a jump list so pressing ctrl-o after following a link takes you back to the link.

https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/

leephillips
Also, it remembers where you were last time you read the document; one of the poster's requirements.
rffn
Last time I checked Zathura did not support annotations. This is too bad. It would be a nice program otherwise for reading. I need annotations though.
zigzaggy
In order: 1. Print 2. Desktop monitor 3. e-ink reader

No other options work for me.

benrbray
Agreed, print is best when I know I will be referencing the PDF more than once. For me, I think the e-reader will become #2 once I get my hands on a Remarkable 2.

https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2

guiambros
I've been very intrigued by Remarkable for a while. I'll hold a couple of years more, to see if 1) the company will survive, and 2) wait for the product to become more mature. It seems Remarkable 1 was a proof-of-concept, but 2 is becoming more of a very decent experience.
zigzaggy
Whoa. I haven't seen this game changer yet. What a cool product, I'm going to dig in and see what folks are saying.

Thanks for sharing!

pugio
I use Polar Bookshelf (getpolarized.io). It has nice, exportable, annotations as well as incremental reading and spaced repetition (via Anki) support. It's still a bit rough around the edges, but it has a very active pace of development and is open source.

It's not perfect yet, but it's the closest thing I've seen that has a chance of getting there.

feifan
A monitor arm with rotation support helps with this! Useful if you're planning to have a long read session, since there is a bit of setup cost (physically rotating the screen and then updating your OS's display settings).

An iPad and an app like GoodNotes or LiquidText is a great alternative.

interestica
PDF Reader by Xodo is the best and fastest reader/annotator I've used on Windows. Excellent with touch screen. Faster than Adobe Reader or Acrobat.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
D13Fd
PDF Expert for Mac and iOS is excellent. Really nice UI, great annotation, good performance on big PDFs.

It doesn’t save your place, but the bookmark interface works well enough for that.

It’s a native app on both OSes.

senorsmile
I transfer the PDF to Google drive. This is just an easy way to get them onto my multiple Android devices.

I download the PDF onto the SD card of any device in want to read it on.

I use ebookdroid to read the PDF. It remembers exactly where I was. It options to auto crop, dark more etc.

To read on multiple devices I track every PDF I'm reading in a Google spreadsheet. This also has the nice side effects of tracking all the PDF's I'm reading, and being able to track my reading progress over time.

cynik_
I bought a Surface Go and found out Drawboard PDF to comfortably read large books and annotate them with the stylus.
immy
Speaking from friends opinions, reMarkable tablet is the way to go for folx often working with PDFs. Great annotation and highlighting. E-ink display. https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable
Libbum
I wouldn't recommend this. PDF support is horrible, particularly if you have a two column layout file. You cannot correctly zoom in far enough in most cases - in the sense that zoom is possible, just absolutely impractical. Without that, you generally need a magnifying glass to read the text on the display.

Very nice hardware, just awful software.

reinhardt1053
Are you talking about the new version or the old one?
Libbum
Version 1. But as I say, the hardware is good. Version 2 will have even better hardware specs, but the operating system I suspect will be the same.
diehunde
Aren't most books single column layout though? If I have to read a paper I can use a tool such as k2pdfopt[1] and read it on my Kindle.

[1] https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

Libbum
I mostly read scientific papers. Quite a good number of them are two column. Haven't come across k2pdfopt before - I'll check it out, thanks!
gnicholas
You can convert PDFs to epub, which would allow you to use a reader that supports text resizing/reflow and automatic bookmarking. I use the SensusAccess converter,[1] which seems to be free for personal use.

I also use the BeeLine Reader PDF extension for Chrome,[2] which helps make long documents easier to read. But I'm probably biased, since I'm the founder :)

1: https://sensusaccess.com/convert-a-file

2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader-pdf...

dunefox
How well does the conversion work for arbitrary pdf files?
gnicholas
I've found the OCR functionality to be pretty good, but YMMV.
f3lheadhunter
I wrote a program which splits it in pieces and then later proceeds to send me an email daily with a chunk. this idea has been helpful
f3lheadhunter
If anybody is interested you may message me at dataf5L@gmail.com
trilinearnz
I've been using DrawBoard PDF on a Surface Pro for my MBA (lots of readings!). It's not perfect, but it's the smoothest experience I've seen thus far, especially in regards to general zooming and panning. You can also customise your own annotation tools in a shortcut bar - very handy.

I wouldn't use it for actual note taking though. The stylus support isn't as good as OneNote (Windows 10 app version), and I haven't had any experience using it with typed notes. I use a separate OneNote notebook for long-form notes in addition to the annotated PDF itself.

Another caveat, sometimes the "text select / highlight" tool doesn't work properly because the PDF reflow has been broken somehow (i.e. you end up highlighting half a page of text when you only wanted a single line). In these instances I switch to the freehand highlight tool instead.

MacSystem
Nowadays I do copy them to kindle and read there.
wsh
For reading books in PDF, I use a Sony DPT-RP1 reader. Its e-ink display can show an entire letter-size page at once, with the original formatting. You can use a stylus to take notes or make highlights; there is no backlight or web browser.

The software has improved since the early releases: for example, you can navigate using a table of contents, if the document has one. I use the dpt-rp1-py program to transfer files; I’ve never tried Sony’s included Digital Paper App.

xtiansimon
I second the Sony Digital Paper system. I’ve had mine for 3 years.

I had been looking for e-ink display for years, before the price came down on the Sony product. Completely satisfied. Also, has 10g memory.

Well. There is one thing I wish they would improve. The stylus lets you mark the page, and a search feature lets you search the document for only two hand-drawn marks—asterisk and star.

I use a set of 9 simple margin marks when reading large documents. Wish I could add custom marks.

rb808
I have a Surface which I found the best tablet as it was bigger than most.

In the end I gave up buying ebooks and went back to regular books. If there is a pdf I have to read I'll do on my workstation.

[dead] gre
one page at a time