Any app that renders PDF type without jagged edges?

[Sonist]

I've tired quite a few, but all seem to render PDF type with jagged edges. Even though the iPad's screen is too small for most PDFs, having smoothly rendered fonts would help a lot.

Is there a reasons PDF do not render well across all the apps I've tried?

Rant:
I also wish Apple would implement margin cropping option in iBooks (or that someone would create an app with the elegance of iBooks, which does it all).

[JMikeD]

Your PDF documents may be PDF image files, as opposed to PDF text files. PDF image files won't scale very well, whereas the PDF image files scale just fine.

[vonCZ]

Originally Posted by JMikeD

Your PDF documents may be PDF image files, as opposed to PDF text files.

I've seen plenty of that. But every now-and-again I'll open a PDF file that appears to be text--you can highlight/select words, sentences, etc--but the text looks really awful. Not as bad as some of the raster-text I've seen, but still really rough around the edges. These PDF files tend to be a bit bigger than regular text PDFs: 7-10 megs for a 200 page book, for example, as opposed to 1 meg for a regular text PDF and 30-40 meg for an image-text PDF.


i'm just curious, is all: what's going on? I've assumed someone scanned the text and then vectorized it--without actually converting it into text--before making the PDF... hence it's smaller than a raster-text PDF, but larger than a text-text PDF.

[Mike_73]

Originally Posted by vonCZ

But every now-and-again I'll open a PDF file that appears to be text--you can highlight/select words, sentences, etc

Actually, some pdfs allow highlighting stuff even though it's a scan. Acrobat pro has some OCR features where you can select whether you want the pdf completely rebuilt or only have some "invisible" text behind the scan so you can highlight and search the text within the scans.

[vonCZ]

ah, that must be it then. Thanks.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Mike_73

Actually, some pdfs allow highlighting stuff even though it's a scan. Acrobat pro has some OCR features where you can select whether you want the pdf completely rebuilt or only have some "invisible" text behind the scan so you can highlight and search the text within the scans.

Yes, that's true, for example, of any book that you download from Google books. Although it's a page scan, it also has OCR'd text in it, which can be searched for, highlighted, copied, etc. On occasions the OCR is, however, rather poor.

Originally Posted by Sonist

Rant:
I also wish Apple would implement margin cropping option in iBooks (or that someone would create an app with the elegance of iBooks, which does it all).

I wished Apple, Amazon, and others would implement margin cropping option too. Stanza does allow you to adjust the margins. Stanza also has more formatting options than iBooks and the Amazon apps. I use it on my iPod touch 4G where any margin is bad when you have such a tiny screen. (I'm not sure if Stanza was upgraded to take advantage of the iPad's large screen though.)

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Yes, that's true, for example, of any book that you download from Google books. Although it's a page scan, it also has OCR'd text in it, which can be searched for, highlighted, copied, etc. On occasions the OCR is, however, rather poor.

So, if I understand you correctly, the PDF contains both image data, which determines the font presentation, and separate, overlayed text information?

But even if this is so, if I zoom in the page, the fonts become perfectly crisp, and if I view the page on a computer monitor, the fonts are crisp. So it must be something to do with the scaling/rendering of the page at the iPad's resolution, right?

[Sonist]

Hah, I found something: the GoodReader many here recommend seems to do away with the jaggies.

I wonder why iBooks can't render PDFs as well.

P.S. The screen is still too small for regular PDFs, though. Even with cropping