Android PDF readers with text reflow: Foxit Mobile beats qPDF and Adobe

Most PDFs were made for printers and big monitors. They often have multiple columns, which looks good on paper but not on small screens. And you usually need to do a lot of horizontal scrolling if you want to keep the letters big enough to read.

Most mobile web browsers rearrange website content to fit your screen. If you want to read PDFs on your phone, you need a PDF reader that can reflow the text to break the lines into chunks that fit a narrow display.


Adobe Reader

Adobe makes bloated clunky apps for Windows, but they made the first free Android PDF reader with text reflow. And their Android app is surprisingly lean and efficient. It behaves quite well too: Adobe Reader for Android won't go online unless you use a feature that really requires internet access.

When you switch on text reflow you can't always increase the size of reflowed text. Even worse, Adobe Reader wraps the text around the pictures (if any), but pictures may end up at unexpected places. If you read scientific papers in Adobe Reader with text reflow switched on, figure legends often appear far away from their figures, which made me look for alternative apps.

• Adobe Reader


qPDF Reader

Large files load really slow in qPDF, but once they're loaded all parts of the document display really fast. There's a scroll thumb for quick scrolling through long texts, and you can make bookmarks to find your way back in PDFs with many pages. qPDF doesn't ask for internet access, but as a result PDFs with DRM usually don't work.

When you switch on text reflow qPDF won't show any pictures, and you often get weird formatting. This is why I don't use qPDF.

• qPDF Viewer


Foxit Mobile PDF Lite

Foxit opens PDFs really fast if they don't have big complex images in them. It can open PDFs from Dropbox and box.net, and Foxit doesn't seem to use its internet permissions for anything else. I couldn't catch it going online when I opened locally stored files.

You can rotate your documents without rotating your phone by pushing a button. You need this button if you want to rotate your text, because rotating your phone won't rotate the screen even if you want it to.

Foxit can remember your position in a file, which is especially useful for large documents. And it has a thumbnail view to quickly navigate to the page you like. It's got bookmarks too, but they only appear when you swipe from the far left to the right. If you missed that part in the quick start guide you'll never find your bookmarks. A bookmark button in the menu would make things a lot easier.

When you scroll through a PDF it may take a while before the content appears, especially in text reflow view. Pinch-to-zoom only works in single page and continuous view mode. You can't zoom in and out by pinching in text reflow view. On the bright side,  the zoom buttons work really well.

Foxit shows images inline in text reflow view at the right places (figures and figure legends stay together), which is the reason it's my default PDF viewer on my Android now. It's my default PDF reader on Windows too.

• Foxit Mobile PDF

Adobe Reader adds pdf annotation, scribbling, highlighting, signing, and form filling

Adobe Reader is probably the worst PDF reader for Windows, but things are different in the Android world.

There are plenty of PDF readers for Android out there, but they're either overpriced, fail to reflow text, etc.

Surprisingly, the Android version of Adobe Reader does a pretty good job. It reflows text, shows it in pages or as a continuous scroll, and the latest version adds a few more goodies.

The new edition behaves a bit more like paper. It lets you annotate your PDFs, scribble and draw on them, highlight text with fluorescent colors, fill forms, and sign them too. So if you want to chain someone to an unbreakable legally binding contract you can add Adobe Reader to your stash of weapons.

• Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader: the return of text reflow

Adobe made a stupid mistake when they removed text reflow from their Android PDF reader.

Text reflow is an essential feature for any PDF reader that has to display PDFs on small phone screens in a way that's fit for reading.

The good news is that Adobe is willing to learn from their mistakes. They updated their app again and put text reflow back in.

The bad news is that the resurrected text reflow option is well hidden. Tapping the menu button does nothing. To reflow your text you now have to tap near the top of the screen and hit the icon that looks like a page. The next version should put the reflow option back into the menu, because that's where you look first when you want to play with the settings.

• Adobe Reader (Android Market)

The (very) old Adobe Reader version 10.0.2 still comes with text reflow in the menu:

• Adobe Reader 10.0.2 at ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/android/10.x/10.0.2/
• Adobe Reader 10.0.2 for Android on Google

Adobe Reader got dumbed down: update kills PDF text reflow

Update: Adobe listened to us. Text reflow is back.

There are many PDF viewers for Android. Unfortunately there are not many good PDF readers for Android, and none of the free PDF viewers can match their PC counterparts.

The free Adobe Reader is not a very good PDF reader, but it had one thing going for it: text reflow.

Yes, the original idea behind PDF is to preserve formatting and layout, but the inventors of PDF never anticipated that one day we'd read PDF files on the small screens of our phones.

Ever tried to read a two or three column PDF on your phone? Then you know why it's a good idea to reflow the text to make things readable on your mobile display.

But Adobe had to ruin it.

The new Adobe Reader update for Android adds bookmarks (not done very well) and lets you read PDFs protected with their own DRM scheme (as if anyone would want to do that), and you can copy text from your PDFs to other apps now.

But...

...Adobe stupidly removed the option to reflow the text of your PDFs to a single screen width fitting column in a legible font size.

Let's hope text reflow comes back in a future version. Until then you better stick with the old version of Adobe Reader if you want to keep the option to reflow your PDFs.

• Adobe Reader (Android Market)

Adobe Reader version 10.0.2 still comes with text reflow:

• Adobe Reader 10.0.2 at ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/android/10.x/10.0.2/
• Adobe Reader 10.0.2 on Google

Ask for the return of text reflow on the Adobe forum. Maybe they'll listen?

• What happened to text reflow? (Adobe Forums)

Update: Adobe listened to us. Text reflow is back.

PDF Viewer has colors and speed but lacks text reflow and pinch-to-zoom

Adobe may have invented the PDF format, but does anyone still use Adobe PDF Reader on their computers? With alternative viewers like Foxit Reader and Sumatra it doesn't make sense to use the bloatware from Adobe on a PC.

What about Android? There are plenty of PDF viewers on the Android Market, and now we have another one: PDF Viewer (a.k.a. Android PDF Viewer or APV).

It's not really new, though. It's an updated version of the open source app PDF Viewer by Maciej Pietrzak. The new edition made by Alexander Pruss is faster, displays page numbers, and has some other improvements.

What sets PDF Viewer apart from other PDF apps is its colors. Black on white is not nice for your eyes unless you're out in the sun or in a brightly lit office. PDF Viewer lets you invert the colors of your pdf, or force it to black on yellow, white on black, green on black, and red on black. Of course plain old black on white is also an option. Reversing colors is not only for looks, but it can save a bit of power on AMOLED screens where darker means less battery drain.

PDF Viewer renders one page ahead, so scrolling down is smooth unless you try to jump too many pages at once. You can speed it up a bit more by skipping the images. If you don't like swiping through your files you can scroll through the pages with the volume buttons. PDF Viewer does a pretty good job of zooming pictures, albeit a bit slow.

There are a few major shortcomings, though. Searching for PDFs in the built-in file browser of PDF Viewer is ugly and inefficient. The back button doesn't move you back to the previous folder, but just exits the app (we already have the home button for that). And in contrast to Adobe Reader, PDF Viewer can't find your PDF files by itself so you really have to navigate all the way through your folder structure. On the bright side, the app remembers your position in the file, which can be useful when you read long eBooks.

PDF Viewer doesn't have pinch-to-zoom, so you'll have to use the zoom buttons instead.

Another flaw is lack of text reflow.

At first glance, text reflow is against the idea behind the PDF format. PDFs were meant to look exactly the way the author intended them to look, without giving a damn about what the reader wants to see.

But when the PDF was invented its makers didn't foresee the invention of the smartphone. The format was originally designed for printers and big computer screens, but what works on a large monitor doesn't work on a small phone display. The typical PDF in its original layout requires lots of horizontal scrolling on a phone, unless you zoom out so far that you need a microscope to read the text.

So reflowing text to fit your screen is essential on a tiny phone display. Unfortunately the only free PDF viewer for Android that gets it right is Adobe Reader.

But the speed, preservation of detail when zooming, and color options are a good reason to give PDF Viewer a try. It may get a lot better in future updates. If you think you can make it better, just do what Alex Pruss did: grab the source code, improve it, and post it back for others to build on.

The latest update is not on the Market (yet), but you can grab a copy from Google Code.

• PDF Viewer (Google Code)
• PDF Viewer by arpruss (xda forum)
• PDF Viewer by Maciej (Android Market)