I got an iPhone! I can't read big PDF's on it!

By -
Whoopee! It's totally awesome and I love it! Thanks so much to Bryan, my brother-in-law, for giving it to me (I think he's getting a 3G one). And yet... I'm realizing that Steve Jobs has decided that I can only do with it what he wants me to. I want to read large PDF files on it (i.e. my D&D rulebooks), and this is not an approved activity. So getting it to happen is enormously problematic. The solutions I've seen on the web involve hacking the phone and installing an Apache web server on it, then loading the pdfs onto the phone and looking at them with the Safari browser. Ugh.

The other way I thought I could do this is to save the pdf as a series of .jpg files, and then use the photo browser to look at them. How clever I am! But the damn iPhone "optimizes" every photo you upload to it, i.e. reduces the quality to crap to save space, so the text is borderline unreadable. And of course there's absolutely no way to turn off this "feature".

I tried uploading the pdf to Google docs and then looking at it with the iPhone browser, but it barfs on anything over a few megs, and Google docs barfs on anything over 10 megs anyway.

You can of course email them to yourself and look at them that way, but the files I want to look at are too big for that.

This is a phone on which you can watch entire episodes of television shows by the way. So there's no lack of storage space or computational power. Apple is being deliberately obtuse in not letting people do what they want with it. Maybe now that they've released an iPhone SDK someone at Adobe will make an Apple-approved pdf reader.

Any suggestions on how to make this happen would be most welcome.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Snarking The Odyssey (with AD&D)

By -
Image
WARNING: Those of you who are accustomed to pithy political remarks here on Internal Monologue should brace yourselves for a major dose of gaming geekitude. Here's a link to one "Jamie R." who does a very snarky close reading of Homer's The Odyssey (HT: Mad Latinist via email). I've only read book 1, but it's pretty funny so far. An excerpt: Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men… Sooooo, he’s in charge, and everybody dies. Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero and his colossal failure. What? … for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever rea...
Read more

Where is 56th and Wabasha? "Meet Me in the Morning" Dylan Mystery Solved

By -
Image
Short version The lyric is not "Fifty-sixth and Wabasha", it is actually "Fifty-six and Wabasha", referring to the intersection of old Minnesota Highway 56 and Wabasha Street in Saint Paul, Minnesota. If you listen, you can hear Dylan sing "fifty-six", rather than "fifty-sixth", particularly on the take that was released as the B-side to "Duquesne Whistle". Minnesota Highway 56 no longer intersects Wabasha Street, but from 1963 to 1974 it did intersect Wabasha Street, at what is now (in Feb. 2021) the intersection of George Street and Cesar Chavez Street in St. Paul, or possibly South Wabasha & Cesar Chavez.  Long Version "Meet Me in the Morning" is the first song on side two of Bob Dylan's celebrated 1975 album  Blood on the Tracks. In the opening lines of the song, according to the lyrics on Bob Dylan's official site (https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/meet-me-morning/), the narrator invites the listener to a rendez...
Read more

Victim or perpetrator? How about both!

By -
Remember in the movie Adaptation , the main character's brother has this idea for a screenplay called The Three? It's about a detective trying to track down a serial killer before he kills his next victim. Pretty standard, right? The twist is that the detective, serial killer, and victim, are all actually the same person . Whoa, dude. Fight Club 's got nothin' on that one. Well, this isn't quite that weird. But apparently, Utah legal authorities are somewhat perplexed by a situation in which a 13-year-old girl and her 12-year-old boyfriend are both simultaneously the perpetrators and victims of the same crime: having sex with each other (HT: Feministing ): Utah Supreme Court justices acknowledged Tuesday that they were struggling to wrap their minds around the concept that a 13-year-old Ogden girl could be both an offender and a victim for the same act - in this case, having consensual sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend. The girl was put in this odd position be...
Read more