Usability as a Reader

[TritonT]

version tested: 1.4b 0901
devices used: HTC Universal, HTC Touch Diamond

I only found Mobile Foxit Reader recently and it is a great PDF viewer. However, I would like to use it at a PDF reader for ebooks etc. Here’s a quick list of the issues I’m having with Reflow -

Renderer has a problem with kerning/tracking causing one letter-pair per line or so to be incorrectly spaced.

There needs to be at least 2 pixel left-hand margin, looks untidy at the minute.

Needs a couple of font choices (a better Garamond, Helvetica and a Times maybe).

Navigation in reflow mode is not adequate. A possible useable scrolling method would be, tap the bottom half of the screen to go to the next screenful (including current last line) and tap the top half of the screen to go to the previous screenful (including current top line). This should be made to work even over page breaks in the original document, not many people want to have to keep the stylus poised to find that green arrow! In 'Key Assignment' there needs to be more options for the Enter key as more devices are being produced with no Left/Right or Up/Down eg the HTC Diamond.

Needs an autoscroller, in this mode tap screen to pause would be useful.

Needs to work in landscape as well.


Sorry that all seems a bit negative, but it's just too annoying to use at the minute. But, I for one would be happy to pay at least $30 for a PDF reader that works properly. There's no real competition, Orneta PDF Reader Mobile (not in development), Pocket Xpdf (not in development) and Adobe Read for Mobile (never really in development!) are all very poor.

[Erik_Bryant]

Hello,

That's not negative at all. Thank you so much for your thoughts! I will make sure the developers look into this. We are really working hard on our Mobile Reader and we are glad you gave us your thoughts. Let us know if you have any further comments.

[ant75]

I'm using the new beta version 1.4. I'm very happy that foxit reader will reflow non tagged pdf's since none of the other competition seems to be able to achieve this. I use a windows mobile 6 device (I-Mate Jasjam) and the application seems to work quite reliably on it.

However, I agree with everything the previous user wrote relative to navigation in reflow mode. A key that could be pressed to give the next and previous reflowed pages of text is sorely needed. The key selections at the moment only browse the document pages themselves. There are key options to scroll up and down the reflowed text by pressing the up and down arrows. This is how I currently use the program to read books. However, I have found that when I get to the end of a page the down arrow will skip to the next page without letting me finish the page i'm currently reading. Worse still once it has skipped to the next page, it will not scroll back up to the bottom of the previous page, but jumps right to the top of the previous page.

This makes the bottom of every page very difficult to read. You seriously have to fix this scrolling problem.

Actually, as the previous user mentioned, it would be nice to ignore the space between document pages all together in reflow mode. Also some options to change the reflowed text size would be sweet.

Just one last thing I have noticed. Sometimes when I enter full screen mode, I find that a little blue box comes up at the bottom of the screen with a white keyboard in it. I don't want this box to be displayed at all. It is very annoying. It covers the text I'm trying to read and makes the readable area of the screen smaller as a result.

I find that if I close Foxit and reload it, that most of the time the blue box doesn't reappear in full screen mode. This is obviously a bug. If it's not a bug and is actually meant to display this blue box then you need an option to turn it off completely in full screen mode. I will not be the only person that wants full screen mode to be full screen mode.

Cheers.

Anthony Smith

[christina]

Thanks for telling us what you would like. I will forward them to our developement team.

' a little blue box comes up ' ---This issue has been fixed and will be updated in our next new version.