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JohnRiddler

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 16, 2012
2
0
I got my first apple 4S as a gift recently and I instantly fell in love with iBooks. But seeing how all 99.9% of my books are scanned PDFs instead of epubs, the lack of support for PDFs really breaks my heart. I brissed them, OCR'ed (via adobe xi pro trial) and then converted them to epubs (via calibre), but it's a lot of hassle and they don't work.

What I need is really simple:
- A clean full screen view
- Smooth continuous vertical scrolling like iBook
- Horizontal screen lock when scrolling (defaulted in iBook)
- Ability to make simple annotations like iBook
- Ability to find my notes easily (like in iBook, tap notes and you can see all the notes, tap specific note and it brings you to the highlighted text)

I don't mind paying a little, but I'd only like to buy ONE app. I don't need the high end functions, I just need apps to perform my aforementioned requirements perfectly.
 
Last edited:

jojoba

macrumors 68000
Dec 9, 2011
1,584
21
I got my first apple 4S as a gift recently and I instantly fell in love with iBooks. But seeing how all 99.9% of my books are scanned PDFs instead of epubs, the lack of support for PDFs really breaks my heart. I brissed them, OCR'ed (via adobe xi pro trial) and then converted them to epubs (via calibre), but it's a lot of hassle and they don't work.

What I need is really simple:
- A clean full screen view
- Smooth continuous vertical scrolling like iBook
- Horizontal screen lock when scrolling (defaulted in iBook)
- Ability to make simple annotations like iBook
- Ability to find my notes easily (like in iBook, tap notes and you can see all the notes, tap specific note and it brings you to the highlighted text)

I don't mind paying a little, but I'd only like to buy ONE app. I don't need the high end functions, I just need apps to perform my aforementioned requirements perfectly.

I'm not familiar with iBooks, but I believe iAnnotate meets all your requirements. I've written about it here. PDF Expert is a nice app, but I don't think it has continuous vertical scrolling.
 

JohnRiddler

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 16, 2012
2
0
I'm not familiar with iBooks, but I believe iAnnotate meets all your requirements. I've written about it here. PDF Expert is a nice app, but I don't think it has continuous vertical scrolling.

Thanks, that's a very concise article but I'm afraid I must have worded it wrongly. I guess I don't need continuous vertical scrolling, I just need smooth verticals scrolling because I read by scrolling instead flipping pages. Some freebies I've tried does this very badly, it takes forever to load the next page and everything is blurry and gives me a headache.
One thing you left out in your article, is that does it allows me to easily search for my notes? I know you don't have iBooks so let me explain. There's a tab in iBooks that is named "notes" and by tapping that I could see all my notes. By tapping on the specific note it brings me to my highlighted text. I'm using perfect reader life as of now, and it wouldn't let me name my bookmarks so I'm giving it up. Pdf reader is way too buggy.
 

jojoba

macrumors 68000
Dec 9, 2011
1,584
21
Thanks, that's a very concise article but I'm afraid I must have worded it wrongly. I guess I don't need continuous vertical scrolling, I just need smooth verticals scrolling because I read by scrolling instead flipping pages. Some freebies I've tried does this very badly, it takes forever to load the next page and everything is blurry and gives me a headache.
One thing you left out in your article, is that does it allows me to easily search for my notes? I know you don't have iBooks so let me explain. There's a tab in iBooks that is named "notes" and by tapping that I could see all my notes. By tapping on the specific note it brings me to my highlighted text. I'm using perfect reader life as of now, and it wouldn't let me name my bookmarks so I'm giving it up. Pdf reader is way too buggy.

I find scrolling in iAnnotate generally smooth.

I haven't tried a word search for my own annotations - but it does allow you to add text to your bookmarks, and there is a menu bar to the left with one section that will outline all your annotations and another section that will outline all your bookmarks, so it's very easy to jump back and forth between them. You can also export your annotations via email.
 

AbeFrohman

macrumors 6502
Mar 18, 2011
454
12
Check out the Foxit PDF reader. Continuous vertical scrolling, searchable notes and annotations, very fast page rendering.
 

sjn419

macrumors 6502
Jun 4, 2010
272
38
im actually looking for the same thing. my concern is more organization then editing the pdfs.

OP check out goodreader. Im still looking
 

jojoba

macrumors 68000
Dec 9, 2011
1,584
21
Thanks, that's a very concise article but I'm afraid I must have worded it wrongly. I guess I don't need continuous vertical scrolling, I just need smooth verticals scrolling because I read by scrolling instead flipping pages. Some freebies I've tried does this very badly, it takes forever to load the next page and everything is blurry and gives me a headache.
One thing you left out in your article, is that does it allows me to easily search for my notes? I know you don't have iBooks so let me explain. There's a tab in iBooks that is named "notes" and by tapping that I could see all my notes. By tapping on the specific note it brings me to my highlighted text. I'm using perfect reader life as of now, and it wouldn't let me name my bookmarks so I'm giving it up. Pdf reader is way too buggy.

iAnnotate goes on sale today for two dollars.
 
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