Although eBooks are great you give up a lot when it comes to formatting. That's why I think Adobe PDFs are a better alternative for content rich documents. The problem is that although the iPad and iPhone both support PDFs natively, they don't have a built-in dedicated PDF viewer. Sure you can view PDF email attachments and PDFs in Safari on the web, but what if you just want to load up a bunch of PDFs on your device and view them whenever you need to? That's where an App like ReaddleDocs comes in. Now of course ReaddleDocs is not the first App of this type I've reviewed and quite frankly I wasn't even sure that I wanted to take a look at yet another one. However, I'm glad I did because I'm very impressed by what I've seen so far. My goal is to have all of my reference manuals for my photography gear in PDF on my iPad. The beauty of this is that the equipment manufacturers already provide downloadable PDFs of their manuals online. So I have them already. Now it's just a matter of choosing the ultimate "Best App" for carrying them around and viewing them as needed. So the things that are important to me are ease and flexibility of getting the PDFs onto the iPad and into the App. I want to be able to do keyword searches. If the PDF has bookmarks (a table of contents), then I want to be able to pull it up and tap to goto a section that I want to read. Also since I help out other people from time to time, it would be great to be able to select text in the PDF and copy and paste it into an email to send to someone.
ReaddleDocs does everything I want
I wouldn't even be reviewing this App if it didn't nail everything I want or at least 90% of it, so YES! ReaddleDocs does a great job matching features up against my requrements. First you can load PDFs into the App/iPad either via iTunes and a USB cable or via WiFi. Once the PDFs are on your iPad you can choose them from the list and view them. I really like how uncluttered the user interface (UI) is compared to other Apps in this category and I really like the scroll knob on the right side to quickly scroll through the pages. It's very unobtrusive. Yes, there is a search feature (a must have for me) and yes you can view the Bookmarks and tap to go to a chapter. You can even add your own bookmarks. So if there is a particular page that you are constantly going to you can bookmark it yourself to make it easy to jump to from here on out. Another cool feature that makes me love this App is that you can configure it with your email account info and it can pull in PDF email attachments that you've received.
Turning pages – One thing about these apps that always throws me is that I expect be able to flip the pages left to right. However, they act more like your computer and you "scroll" or flick up and down. This is not necessarily a bad thing in the App, but it's just not the behavior my brain expects.
Other document support - Just like the iPad itself ReaddleDocs can view Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as well as iWork documents.
Video Support! – A nice surprise. When I connected to my iDisk, I saw a video there in the App so of course I tapped it. It seemed to download the video as it took a couple of minutes and there was a progress bar. The next thing you know my .MP4 was playing. Sure enough when I went back to the documents list I now have a "Movies" section with one movie in it. Speaking of which another feature I like is that you can enable a Password via the settings. This is great for people who are carrying sensitive documents around that they don't want just anyone who picks up their iPad to be able to view.
Although the App is GREAT and definitely serves the bulk of my needs I am slightly disappointed in a couple of areas. Copying text is possible, but it wasn't obvious to me. I had to ask the developer. Instead of tapping to bring up the selection function you actually choose "Copy to clipboard" from the Share menu first. Then it will display a selection rectangle for you to choose the area you want to copy. It works great, just not the UI I expected. The next thing that all of these 3rd Party Readers suffer from is that they don't quite offer "full" PDF support. In other words although PDF is an open standard, Apple doesn't fully implement all of its features on their devices or Mac OS X. So for example, if you have PDF with form fields and that PDF has data in those fields, that data will NOT show up on screen in ReaddleDocs. So I imagine that Readdle Docs is using the built-in PDF render engine, which has always lacked this function. Lastly, although you can grab PDFs from your email accounts (very cool), MS Exchange email support isn't offered. On the plus side: in addition to grabbing document attachments ReaddleDocs can also grab PDFs from your MobileMe iDisk, Dropbox, GoogleDocs and others as well as any WebDAV server.
The Bottom Line
If you're looking for a GREAT PDF viewer, this is it! Is it the best one? Hmmm, I'd have to say of the ones I've tried to date… YES! Why? Because I like the UI better than the others that are out there.
You can get ReaddleDocs for iPad here from the App Store. You can also get the iPhone/iPod touch version here.
ReaddleDocs for iPad
ReaddleDocs is a powerful PDF view for the iPad with a great user interface.
- Igor Zhadanov
- Get on App Store
- $4.99
All info was collected on 7th May, 2010 when the app was reviewed.
About Terry White
Terry is the co-author of The Best Selling "The iPhone Book" 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions. He has been active in the industry for over 25 years and is the founder and president of MacGroup-Detroit, Inc., Michigan's largest Macintosh Users Group, host of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and a technology writer - Terry White Tech Blog.
Terry, you recommended Goodreader a few issues back. Has ReaddleDocs replaced that as your favorite PDF reader?
Dan,
I think it has. It’s less cluttered than Goodreader and offers a few more bells and whistles.
What does it offer over GoodReader?
A less cluttered viewing interface and direct email attachment support by logging into your email accounts directly.
Do ether offer ‘folders’ or ‘folder-like’ feature?
Thanks for the review and especially your comments about the current inadequacies of formats such as ePub. Amazon, Apple and the rest should support and sell PDF ebooks on devices such as the Kindle and iPad, which can easily display an entire book page. They have larger enough screens to display a PDF version of most book pages and do with apps like ReaddleDocs. The same should be true of ebooks being sold on the market.
It’d be easier for publishers, since they could simply supply a tweaked version of the PDF that created the print version. And it’d be much better for readers, since the books would look better and have more complex pages. The current ebook formats are adequate for novels and biographies but not much else.
I’ve got several books that I’d love to release as Kindle and iPad editions, but neither device’s store app can handle even the modest complexity of their formatting. That’s ridiculous. The sad fact is that ebooks won’t really take off until the formatting gets past the HTML 1.0 stage. At present, the easiest way to do that is with PDF.
I would like to know PDF forms can be filled in on the iPad? I am looking for a PDF app that will allow me to fill in forms.
Hi Tommy, we’re currently working on that kind of application both for iPhone and iPad, which will allow to fill in PDF forms.
Stay in touch with Readdle and we will let you know when it will happen.
http://twitter.com/Readdle
Denys Zhadanov
Readdle
I’d like to be notified about the the pdf form filler app as soon as it’s released! Thanks in advance!
Can PDF forms be filled in on the iPad? I am looking for an app that will allow me to fill in and edit pdf forms.
Hi,
We are rolling out iPads for our sales force and desperatly need an app that allows for PDF forms. What is the ETA?
Tracy
I currently use Goodreader but it falls short in 2 areas.
No iWork support and lack of PDF Search.
Does readdle read iWork files without issues and
Can you search for keywords within multiple PDFs or is the search restricted to the name of the PDF or within a single PDF.
Just checked Goodreader again, and it does open iWork documents
Put me in for the pdf form filler as well!
Dear all,
I am looking at iPad PDF reader that will able me to select text for copying in another document, please help
ReaddleDocs DOES let you copy text from a PDF and paste it into another app. Just tap the send icon (second from the right) and then select your text and hit copy.
Use smartNote for highlighting text in PDF.
Does anyone know if ReaddleDocs lets you open the files in other apps? For example, GoodReader lets you touch manage files and when you select one it gives you the option “open in…” and lets you pick other pdf viewers like iAnnotate to open the file in.
Hi
I need a feature to highlight paragraphs in pdf so that I can constantly go back to revisit them, likely studying for exams. Goodreader can’t do that. can readdle enable highlighting paras that can be saved?
Stanley,
YES! ReaddleDocs DOES allow highlighting within the app. Just note though that the highlighting you do here is only visible in ReaddleDocs. In other words if you open that PDF in another app the highlighting won’t be there.
I have thousands of PDFs I would like to access on an iPad — so, I would like to see them on an iPad like on my Mac: in folders, not in just one lonnnnnnnng list.
The new version now let’s you save the highlights in the PDF so that will be seen by other apps.
I’m wondering if you can then print the highlighted text if you need to.
I have many PDF files with text highlighted by Acrobat Professional 8. Can I view these files and continue highlighting them in ReaddleDocs?
My small construction company sees the iPad as an expensive impressive toy which will become an unbeatable mobile platform for enterprise the moment that a PDF form can be filled out
The ipads ability to launch a browser from suspend to active in a matter of seconds to populate a mailable PDF form is what it must have if it is going to fulfill it’s controversial use as an enterprise device. It will be awesome when it happens!
Write it I and thousands of others will buy it!
I need the same app. I need to fill out several pdf forms and email them off on my ipad
A client of ours will be very keen to have a system where PDF forms can be signed on an iPad. It would get rid of pretty much all our paper usage!
Regards,
Prakash
All of us Are waiting for that ! Please, do IT and you become very rich with tris application…
We need IT, and this app will be a killer application !
I like to know if I have PDF files with highlighted words in different colour and Text boxes with comments will it import this to an iPad.
I want to download or at the least have access to my textbooks for grad school on my iPad, is this the best app for me?
Love most what ReaddleDocs can do on iPhone and iPad, but ReaddleDocs’s SugarSync integration doesn’t show SugarSync’s shared and web archive folders, while GoodReader makes all SugarSync folders available. For this reason, I have to keep GoodReader around.
I am looking for a pdf reader for my ipad that can copy pictures/charts and graphs out of a pdf and into something else, mainly flahcard deluxe or pages.
I just purchased the Ipad2 and am searching for the best app that will allow me to download several pdf files and also create files to hold the pdfs so they are more organized. I’d hate to meet with a client to show their property package and then have them see a competitors property as well.
Do any of the following allow you to create folders and then insert pdfs into them to be stored on the Ipad?
Readdle Docs
Istorage HD