fast (rendering) pdf reader

hi. i've tried several, and in my informal tests iannotate is the fastest. that said, you'll still end up with some checkerboarding for large files. android is no better with its reading apps. heck, even my latest model mbp with 8gb is slower than i would like. pdfs appear to be a resource hog, so i would guess it will be a few years before the ipad can move beyond the checkerboard.

iAnnotate was also the fastest I tried.

palpatine said:

hi. i've tried several, and in my informal tests iannotate is the fastest. that said, you'll still end up with some checkerboarding for large files. android is no better with its reading apps. heck, even my latest model mbp with 8gb is slower than i would like. pdfs appear to be a resource hog, so i would guess it will be a few years before the ipad can move beyond the checkerboard.

Click to expand...

What did you do to your MBP? Mine can open PDFs and display random pages instantly via Preview, even with documents 100+ pages in length.

On that note, iBooks for the iPad is fairly fast, but if you're scanning through pages or switching quickly between pages it's going to checkerboard. I'm not sure if there's a way to improve much on this. (iBooks is definitely less than ideal for large documents)

+1 for iAnnotate.

JacaByte said:

What did you do to your MBP? Mine can open PDFs and display random pages instantly via Preview, even with documents 100+ pages in length.

On that note, iBooks for the iPad is fairly fast, but if you're scanning through pages or switching quickly between pages it's going to checkerboard. I'm not sure if there's a way to improve much on this. (iBooks is definitely less than ideal for large documents)

Click to expand...

My PDFs have at least several hundred pages, and some are nearly 2,000 pages in length. Plus, they are often OCR'd scans of documents, books, etc., so the file size is large. For native PDFs, the MBP flies, and the iPad does pretty well. Unfortunately, I have very few of those.

I haven't tried iAnnotate yet.

How does GoodReader compare to iBooks when handling large PDFs?
I've been using goodreader for the past year. I heard that iBooks has improved significantly

Sinophile said:

I haven't tried iAnnotate yet.

How does GoodReader compare to iBooks when handling large PDFs?
I've been using goodreader for the past year. I heard that iBooks has improved significantly

Click to expand...

they are in different leagues if you are doing anything beyond just reading. ibooks is pretty. that's it.

+1 for iAnnotate

Hi guys
I tend to use WritePDF by EuroSmartz, a pretty nifty little app!

Okay, so just tried iAnnotate, iBooks, CloudReader, Stanza, FastPDF, and Bookman side by side on the same PDF and Bookman Pro was leagues faster than all the others. (ironically Fast PDF was the slowest of the lot)

Have any of the iAnnotate fans tried Bookman Pro?

I can't comment at all about depth of features, but for speed alone which was my single solitary concern it blows iAnnotate away.

If anyone has a faster app for basic PDFs please do share.

It's lightning quick compared to iBooks, but sacrifices the beautiful smoothing that iBooks offers. Takes longer to smooth text when you zoom, and worse doesn't smooth enough when not zoomed. So the one thing it's not ideal for is graphic novels and comic books.

That said, you can page easily 2x faster on the first pass, and after you've already loaded the pages once you can you can basically flip as fast as you can click. This has made it my go-to app for anything I'm reading when browsing/scanning speed trumps esthetics.

Fastest PDF Reader I've found....

Try pdf-notes.
It's the fastest PDF reader I've found.
Also has markup abilities, fully integrated with dropbox, google drive, etc.

It caches the whole document. Once finished, you can flip through a 2,000 page document faster than the real hard copy.

Because of this app I use 1dollarscan.com services to convert all of my hard copy text books.

Needless to say, many shelves of books can fit on an ipad !

Try the official Adobe Reader App. Works for me.