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Can The Ipad Handle Large PDF's Effectively?

I

isildur

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 6, 2010
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I just bought an iPad to use solely as an e-book reader for my textbooks. They range in size from 16 mb to 800 mb for a total of 6 gb.

Every program I've used--iBooks, GoodReader, CloudReader and Stanza--has crashed immediately upon opening any file over 100 mb.

Is there an app that could handle big files, or should I go back to the MacBook?

Any help is appreciated.
 
isildur said:
I just bought an iPad to use solely as an e-book reader for my textbooks. They range in size from 16 mb to 800 mb for a total of 6 gb.

Every program I've used--iBooks, GoodReader, CloudReader and Stanza--has crashed immediately upon opening any file over 100 mb.

Is there an app that could handle big files, or should I go back to the MacBook?

Any help is appreciated.
Click to expand...

Those are insanely huge file sizes. Did you buy them that way or are they scans that you (or someone else) created?
 
I have 2500 page tech manuals that render just fine. That said, they aren't 100+ megabytes. I don't want to be accusatory, but I haven't seen a 100+ mb PDF before that wasn't "scanned to PDF" if you know what I mean? So yeah, several hundred pages of image files will probably crash it.
 
dtlee1974 said:
I have 2500 page tech manuals that render just fine. That said, they aren't 100+ megabytes. I don't want to be accusatory, but I haven't seen a 100+ mb PDF before that wasn't "scanned to PDF" if you know what I mean? So yeah, several hundred pages of image files will probably crash it.
Click to expand...

I would imagine that any PDF which has the capacity to exceed the memory on the iPad could give you problems.
 
Got a couple of 300-pagers here which are sheet music, so they're entirely scanned. In iBooks, the iPad takes about a second or two to load each page. Seems to handle them ok.
 
The largest PDF I've thrown at my iPad is a 130mb PDF which consisted of essentially images for each of the 448 pages (got tired of lugging around my huge Dragon Quest IX game guide and went hunting for a digital version).

It opens and reads just fine in ReaddleDocs, although I haven't tried it in GoodReader (where I generally read all of my PDF's).

I can't imagine an 800mb PDF -- I can't see that working well on a Mac or a PC much less an iPad.
 
Seems to me that the "Reduce File Size" feature in Acrobat would come in mighty handy in a situation like this.
 
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Good reader does a decent job for me with my 963.2 MB PDF. it does sometimes crash the app but this may be like one of every 35 times. It's my Snap-On Catalog which is full of pics and colors. 600+ pages. I haven't tried to resize it yet but that may be something I look intor this weekend.
 
I've not had any problems with opening PDFs but none are in the >100 MB size.
 
GoodReader opens up the Fallout 3 GOTY Edition strategy guide just fine and it's >700 pages. The New Vegas guide takes a little time to open up, but it still works :)
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

I use GoodReader, largest PDF I have is 320mb with about 1400 pages. I don't use that particular book much so not sure how it effects the iPad coming in and out of it.
 
on a 800MB PDF you can fit the bible in multiples languages ... Something doesn't add up. but in any case, i got a couple of tech manuals that are 1200 pages and 958 pages and they are 80Mb and 114mb, both open just fine on iBooks and Kindle
 
I have several medical textbooks I scanned into my ipad, I use goodreader and iAnnotate. While they both get the job done, they are very slow in loading and when you flip pages there is a delay of several seconds to flip to the next page. The files aren't that large really, I'd say one of the larger ones is about 250mb or so, it's a radiology textbook and has a ton of images. These are all optimized and have OCR thru Adobe Acrobat 9.0.

So I'd say it's doable, but certainly not optimal. Still, that textbook I mentioned must weight 10lbs., I'll take it on my ipad any day of the week.
 
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Exactly , same here , all my medical books are 300mb plus with few upto 1gb and above

Of all apps I have been trying over the years, Documents by readdle was the best , but after 1-2 year of annotation (heavy) I have to upgrade to a new ipad (not happy about it)
 
My law text books are about 700 pages, the ones that I can't get digital, I get the spine cut of, scan them from paper at 600dpi black and white with the tiniest double sided scanner, then OCR-ed by Acrobat in clearscan and they are around 20-25 Mb.

I once had an awefully badly scanned document, 1500 pages, couldn't reduce it without making it unreadable and that became 3,8Gb. Was horrible to scroll trough with acrobat, preview did it better, but still no fun on macOS.
Funny thing was that on my iPad's it's really working well, I use Documents5 and it flies trough. I'll scroll trough it like it is just 15 pages.
It's just that I haven yet found a way to scan 1500 pages to PDF and OCR on my iPad. That's a pity.

Edit: For the OP: I downloaded the 3,8Gb file again to my iPad using Documents 5, opened it and it was readable without a problem. Some other files as well at 1,2Gb, 1,5Gb and several between 500 and 1000Gb. All did perfect.
 
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