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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> it's the best tool (period) for reading datasheets (or any large PDF documents)

Sounds intriguing. How would I go about copying the PDFs that are currently on my Linux PC onto it, though?

I use Nextcloud[1], a self-hosted, platform-agnostic file sharing / personal cloud app. It's FOSS and is super easy to set up through Docker.

Whatever file I put onto it is available on iOS, Android, a browser and WebDAV. It also supports camera upload.

Germany recently switched to Nextcloud[2] to share data between agencies and as a privacy-respecting alternative to G Suite / MS.

When I upload a .doc to the platform my iPhone can open it within the app. Same for PDFs.

[1] https://nextcloud.com

[2] https://nextcloud.com/blog/german-federal-administration-rel...

I love that all the proposed solutions here totally suck. If the iPad would just work as a USB flash drive, all these convoluted transfer methods wouldn't be necessary.

"Suck" is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Between "plug the iPad into the computer and drag files from your computer onto a folder that's on the iPad's drive" and "drag files from your computer onto a folder that automatically syncs to the iPad," I count one less step in the second approach, but I guess YMMV.

The included "Files" app in iOS/iPadOS 13 can mount SMB shares.

Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, a USB cable, a USB drive...

Classic solution is email it to yourself.

> a USB drive

For a moment I thought this was going to be the solution, but then I looked into it and it turns out that you need an external power supply even for a flash drive.

Pass them through an intermediary, such as Google Drive?

I use Readdle PDF Expert (or the free Documents), which syncs entire directories from Dropbox, both ways.

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