So, in these times, I’ve read a lot of PDFs - mainly RPG’s I’ve purchased in places like DrivethruRPG .
I have a 17 inch laptop, so the screen is fairly big - but - my issue is, that I find it fairly troublesome to read pdf’s of A4 sized books. I’d love for it to be in book format, so I can watch the lovely illustrations like this
The text seems rather small when I do that. I can of course zoom in, which is wonderful, but I do find that this detracts from the experiece, to be reading the PDF like this instead. Also, the scrolling to next page is kinda annoying as well.
Since it sounds like you might be in the market for a dedicated device, I feel like I have to ask: have you tried printing any hardcopies and reading that? Not with your own printer, but at a shop of some kind.
Yeah, I’m more interested in a technical solution other than a hardcopy print. Usually, its for bed reading for instance, or in a comfy chair where the lightning isn’t the best for hardcopy reading :-)
For book-like stuff, which 90% of the time is board game rulebooks, I use my iPad. Currently using YACReader, which seems to perform better than Acrobat or the Apple app with image-heavy documents. For work I just use Acrobat, but I don’t do the two-page view unless the format of the document absolutely demands it.
I have an iPad 3 I use for a lot of pdf stuff but man there’s no way I’d pay idpad or surface pro prices just for reading PDFs. Surely a cheapo android tablet with Xodo would be perfectly fine if pdf reading was really the only purpose.
I’ll echo “on my iPad”, like a lot of folks here are saying, with the Goodreader app. (There might be better ones but a consistent frustration of mine with iOS and its app ecosystem is that there’s often no way to try before you buy, or refund once you have. So Goodreader was recommended, Goodreader is what I bought, and that’s the only one I will probably ever use.)
On PC I don’t especially like reading PDFs, but for stuff I’m just checking out or need to quickly reference or whatever without faffing about with an iPad transfer, I use SumatraPDF which is free, lightweight, and works great for PDFs, epubs, and so on. As far as I can tell, you still need Adobe for like, specially formatted PDFs with scripting or whatnot, or fillable forms. But for reading? It’s so much better.
Thanks for the Ipad suggestions everyone - I dislike Apple though, so I am assuming here that any tablet will do.
I’ll be looking at a Samsung I think - since thats the ecosystem I am already quite familiar with. For something like this, I doubt one needs the newest and best!
Not sure where you’re located, but I just got the Lenovo M10 tablet and I’m quite impressed. I ordered the 4GB/128 tab for $200, and they sent it boxed with a dock. The eBay link has since been changed to the 64GB model, but for $200 I think it’s a great tablet buy.
I mean, it’s not like I’ve had any problems with Goodreader, and I don’t feel like switching unless I’m having problems due to another thing I hate about iOS, the file structure where documents are proprietary to a single app. Just saying that it’s possible that the best PDF app on iOS is one I didn’t try. But I would be skeptical of a free one because free on mobile usually equals full of obnoxious ads, often with a subscription to turn them off, not just a one time fee.
If your only goal is PDF reading, sure, an Android tablet will probably be fine. It’s a surprisingly hardware intensive thing, especially for RPG sourcebooks, though. So I’d not assume you can get away with an el-cheapo model.
Maybe, but the iOS tablets are well supported as compared to Android tablets. So you have a lot more apps to choose from (and much higher quality ones).
