iOS Crashing with Specific PDFs

[Scuby]

I've got a couple of PDFs which always crash when viewed on either my iPad or iPod Touch 4G - whether opened in Safari, Mail, or iBooks.

I've tried re-saving it from Preview on my Mac, in case there was some corruption, and also found an online scanner which said there were no problems with it.

One example is this PDF: http://www3.hants.gov.uk/newforestmap-2.pdf

Can anyone tell me whether the problem is universal (ie it crashes every iOS device), and whether there's any solution? I have tried saving it as a PNG, which is ok but then I have to keep it in Photos which isn't ideal - I'd like it to be in iBooks alongside all my other similar maps / route guides.

Any clues / tips really would be appreciated.

Cheers,

David

 

[Agent-P]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (device; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

I can confirm this isn't a universal ios issue because I got it to open on my first gen iPod Touch. As for the issue, I haven't the slightest clue as to why it crashes on your device.

 

[Scuby]

Thanks for checking. Is your iPod Touch on an older version of iOS? Just wondering if something maybe broke in a more recent version... both my devices are on 4.3.3...?

David

 

[Daveoc64]

The PDF you link to is very complex.

The map is quite detailed and contains several layers of images and text.

My iPhone 4 (with iOS 4.3.3) can open it fine, but it does take a while for it to appear on the screen (I used MobileMe to get it onto my phone).

Changing from Portrait to Landscape mode took about 30 seconds.

Are you using the latest version of iOS (4.3.3 for both of the devices that you list)?

The only thing I can think of is that the iPad (the original model) and iPod touch only have 256MB of RAM (the iPhone 4 has 512MB of RAM) although they should be able to cope with the PDF file.

 

[Scuby]

Are you using the latest version of iOS (4.3.3 for both of the devices that you list)?

The only thing I can think of is that the iPad (the original model) and iPod touch only have 256MB of RAM (the iPhone 4 has 512MB of RAM) although they should be able to cope with the PDF file.

Yep, latest version of iOS on both. Good thought about the RAM though. I guess I was thinking that I've had PDFs of a similar (and larger) filesize before, but you're right that it's trying to show a lot of detail on a single page, which a long text document doesn't have to do.

Had a thought though, I'm going to try to save it as an image, and then "print" the image back into a new PDF. I'll see how that goes and report back.

Cheers for the idea!

David

 

[Scuby]

Woohoo, saving at as a PNG and then re-saving that PNG as a PDF seems to work. Must have just been too complex / ran out of memory to display it.

Slightly unfortunate as the new version is about 3x bigger and the image is a little slow to load too, but at least it works!

Many thanks,

David

 

[Agent-P]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (device; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

Glad to hear you figured put your problem. And just in case anyone reads this thread in the future, I am running ios 3.1.3

also I didn't have any apps backgrounded when I was opening the file, so that couldve helped with having anough available ram.