Ask HN: Do you read PDFs on small screens? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you read PDFs on small screens?

9 pointsldenoue11 comments

I’m always reading papers on my phone, but is it something people do a lot? I’m developing a pdf reflow tool available online at https://docushow.com

Please let me know if it’s something you’d find useful.

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I’d find it useful yes. Although not sure I’d pay for a solution. But I imagine businesses paying for it. A lot of industries have to use PDFs and have people on the move. Eg property inspectors.

I would, but Android Chrome doesn't have a PDF viewer for links found while searching. You must download the PDF. I don't want to download something. I want a desktop like experience here. All the guides I've found to open rather than download PDFs on Android don't work.

My pain point is managing downloads maybe. I don't want misc crap on my phone. If something could open the PDFs in some scratch disk and clean up automagically (but prevent subsequent downloads within some period of time), it would be helpful. Would I pay for it? Probably not. I just skip the PDF content or copy the link and view it on a laptop/desktop. Maybe if the app to do this was like $3 I might get it. And only maybe.

Edit: I have downloaded PDFs for later viewing on the phone when I know I want and/or need the content.

But if the pdf looked readable on your Android then you might like to read them right there as opposed to later on your laptop, right?

Absolutely

I read a lot of PDFs on my phone and I have enough tools to help me read so I am not sure how many people would find another tool useful unless there is an added advantage you can find to provide.

I would suggest you to not worry about if people want it, but just make it for your own learning growth. All the best!

That’s why I am doing it: for myself first but I’m still trying to understand who would really use this.

I do, mainly on an exercise bike at the gym. I use Calibre to reformat and boost the text size.

What's useful about boosting the text size is making it readable at arm's distance, a flick to change page isn't a problem.

Ahhhh! Experienced a very hard crash loading a PDF into docushow.com. Actually had to reboot which almost never happens (Ubuntu 18.04, FF). This is a good problem to solve. I read a lot of Arxiv papers on mobile. Experience is ok on Android / Chrome. But HTML5 translation would be nice. Wikisource texts are a good example. Just do all processing server side. Only send resulting plain vanilla markup and images to mobile browser. Best of luck ;)

What link was causing the crash?

this will be very useful to me, but I found some corrupted (overlapped) text on https://docushow.com/viewdoc?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fp...

Oops that’s a problem with finding columns. I’ll see how to solve it. Thank you!

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