Is reading PDFs on mobile a pain?

> I’m trying to understand how big a problem it is to read PDFs on mobile.

The "simulated sheet of paper" aspect of PDF's make them a pain on anything with a screen size smaller than needed to show the whole "pdf page" at a readable size to the user at once. On anything smaller one has to zoom and pan around.

However, you can see for yourself. Assuming you have a smartphone/tablet, just install a PDF reader if it does not already have one [1], then start viewing various PDF's.

> Personally I’d prefer viewing a responsive and accessible HTML version instead of having to pan and zoom the original pdf.

I agree.

[1] here is one you can install if your device does not already have a pdf reader: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.artifex.mupdf.viewer.app...

Depends on how long the Document is...

If its smallish like a sign where there is more art than text I'd image it (jpg, 150dpi) Small, prints OK and is quickly viewable. Maybe include the text copy along for indexing/ADA purposes.

A couple pages (brochure content), then I'd try to do a mobile web version and also offer the PDF if the style is something that adds to the content.

Long format (booklet, paper, guide, long story, magazine), where the audience is going to be reading it for a while PDF makes sense: you can style it, able to read off-line easier, and its no big to the user that they are breaking from the web to read. Been enjoying old magazines and comic books in the internet archive, can either use their on-line reader or download PDF. Either are OK, if I expect to travel, will DL some PDfs.

Personally, reading PDFs on mobile is not really much more painful than reading PDFs on a desktop machine. PDFs are just painful, period.

I avoid PDFs whenever possible, mobile or desktop. They're designed for printing. There are better formats for reading, for comics, and so on. The worst are anything done in dual column pages... it sometimes takes me days to fully read a paper because of the strain, and I've never finished reading any game books on PDF.

Reading PDFs as html would Be nice, but as a ML engineer having high quality conversion would be very useful for large scale analysis and information extraction of pdf documents!

>Personally I’d prefer viewing a responsive and accessible HTML version instead of having to pan and zoom the original pdf.

It's called epub. I read ebooks and documentation in this format, which is basically packaged html.

PDFs are great. I can download it to my device, scroll, pinch, and zoom, and I don't have to wait for new pages to load and hope my network connection is good.

My use case for PDFs on phone are usually technical manuals.

I have a huge XL phone so it's not a problem. Also I don't have to do it often. A small phone and frequent use would be a huge pain though.