PDF on my LifeDrive



It's been a long wait, but Palm handhelds can finally display native PDF files. Documents To Go 8 adds PDF To Go as part of its office suite. Previously, PDFs had to be converted to be read on the Palm, but now they can be displayed in their native glory, with pictures and layouts fully intact. With such graphic power comes limitations inherently built into handheld devices.

Palm displays a maximum of 320X480 pixels; PDFs are never made with such small dimensions in mind. So, yes, you can see the pretty layouts of your PDF, but that's about all you'll be able to see. Most of the time you'll be reaching for the Zoom or the Word Wrap button to read the text. The Zoom button enlarges your page up to 200%, enabling you to see text and graphics clearly. But then you'll be seeing only chunks of them at a time on your Palm screen, so you'll be scrolling around struggling to read in some coherent order. Thank goodness there's the Word Wrap button. Word Wrap strips bare of any graphics and layouts from your PDF and displays only the text. You can also choose small, medium or large font to read with complete legibility. This is where I suspect we will spend most of our time in. Then I realize the Word Wrap function is essentially the same as PDF conversions in previous versions of Documents To Go and other similar tools. The only difference is the conversion is done on-the-fly on your Palm and not on your desktop. But that's not necessarily a good thing, which brings us to the other point.

Palm doesn't have the CPU power to view native PDFs efficiently. You'll notice it right away when you open a PDF in PDF To Go, because a long blue progress bar appears in the middle of the screen. You'll get to know this blue bar a whole lot, because it also shows up each time you turn a page, zoom in or out, change font size, go into Word Wrap, or leave. How long a wait depends on how graphic-intensive your PDF is, mines took a few seconds to a minute, so be patient.

With all this said, do I recommend a native PDF viewer for the Palm? Yes, I do. It's about time, too. Viewing a graphic-rich PDF on the Palm is a beautiful thing, albeit impractical. So I'll be using it mostly to read ebooks and to view other graphic-light PDFs. Also the convenience of dropping my PDF files from my PowerBook into my LifeDrive without having to go through a whole conversation process is sweet.

Just before DTG 8 came out, another native PDF viewer was already out in beta. PalmPDF is free to the public. More choices to us Palm users. Great!

Filed Fri - November 11, 2005, 03:53 AM in

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