[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Hey, I’m a PDF user… mostly through business, but it comes up in personal life as well. So I checked out the Adobe Reader LE that came packaged on the TP2. But I was immediately disappointed when I discovered it would not do reflow… even on a screen as clear as this, reflow is crucial.

There were supposed to be upgrades for the app, so I headed for the Adobe site. (Sure, there are third-party PDF readers, but they generally can’t do reflow, either. Only the Adobe apps I’ve tested can do reflow, so I don’t even check out the others.) The Reader for Pocket PC listed as being designed for WinMobile 2003, and didn’t look like it had been optimized for touchscreen phones, but I knew that version could reflow, so I downloaded it to give it a spin.

Once I was home, I ran the EXE file and downloaded Adobe Reader. I opened it to (again) one of my books, which I knew for a fact was tagged for reflow, and this time, it opened and reflowed perfectly. The text was not as crisp as it was in other readers, but it was still legible. Slightly increasing the font size helps. I was able to access all of the menu controls, and advance the pages, with the expected finger-swipes.

But the really bad news came when I tried to close the file, and the TP2 hung up for a bit (okay… a worrisome 10+ minutes, refusing to shut down the app, or itself) before I finally forced the issue by pulling the battery. I tried again with another novel-sized file, and had the same result. Next I tried a short-story (less than a tenth the size of a novel file), and again it locked up before closing… so I can’t recommend using Reader 2.0 for any size of reflowed PDF at all. Very sad, as Adobe Reader does now work on devices with a decent amount of processing power, unlike the old days… but who wants to turn it off by yanking the battery? I soon removed the Reader 2.0 app, and left Reader LE on… though I honestly don’t know what, if anything, I’ll ever do with it.