How to read PDF files on iPhone via Safari instead of lame email attachments

The 2 main drawbacks to reading PDFs on the iPhone are the must-send-it in email in order to store and open “solution” and the user-unfriendly, landscapeless left-right scrolling reading mode. Not anymore. Both problems can easily be overcome with the help of a Safari browser hack using the almost forgotten data: URI schemes. From now on you can store and open your PDF files (and many others) in the iPhone’s Safari browser even in the Wi-Fi- and EDGE-less airplane mode and you can read PDFs in a landscape mode with only 1 one pich (that fits a column) and significantly less left-right scrolling in a much more satisfying, although not yet perfectly manner.

Here I show you in 4 steps how to do so.

1. Convert your source PDF file (by encoding an uploaded file from your folders or from URL) to a valid data: URI format with the help of a converter. I used the online The data: URI kitchen encoder but others are available too, you can even use a Perl script (and run it with Terminal under Mac OS X, thanks Mike). This will generate a very long and ugly URI line. (Sample PDF: Proposition 71 of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine)

2. Copy/paste the long and ugly URI code into Safari and add it to your Bookmark Bar.

3. Sync your iPhone’s bookmarks with your Mac’s Safari bookmarks via iTunes, with that you can create a direct link for the PDF on your iPhone’s Safari bookmarks.

4. You’re ready, open the PDF file from the bookmarks and read it with a 1 pich landscape mode.

The same algorithm with screenshots:

1.

2.

3.

4.

I’d like to thank for W. Clawpaws and the commenters (specially overkill for the link and iluvcapra for the reality check).

Here is Peter Meyers’ diagnosis in length:

First, the only way to permanently store and view a PDF is to email it to yourself and then open the attachment. Because the iPhone doesn’t have any kind of user accessible folder system, you can’t save the PDFs and view them later, as you might on a regular PC. The second, and more serious problem, is that text in a PDF doesn’t “reflow” to fit your phone’s display. When you first open a PDF all the text fits onscreen as in this picture but the text is too small to read. When you use the iPhone’s zoom-in feature, you’re back in the dreaded, reader-unfriendly land of having to scroll left and right. What a pain. Apple could help solve this problem by letting you change the PDF’s orientation from portrait to landscape (which is what you can do with the Web browser and photos on the iPhone).

Comment of iluvcapra on the original Life with Lunchhooks post: I successfully encoded the entire first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to PDF and moved it to my iPhone. It even opens it, though Safari generally crashes after a few minutes of scrolling down pages. The PDF I made was 1.2 Megs.
Also, Safari on my Macbook would beachball for minutes at a time when I’d try to copy/paste or move the data URL around the bookmark page. I had to use the Property List editor to add the data: URL into my bookmarks with any speed.

Another source link from Hackszine.

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