Alert: This software is only available for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.
There is a plethora (I always love using that word) of apps for reading pdf files on mobile devices. I've used iBooks, Evernote, Dropbox, Bluefire Reader, plus others. And they're all fine for just reading the file. But when I'm reading a C&RL article or an Ithaka S+R report or a white paper from an ALA committee, I like to highlight sections and make margin notes. GoodReader lets me do that and more.
GoodReader, by Good.iWare, has standard ebook reader functionality like day/night mode, bookmarks, easy navigation within a document, automatic page orientation, full text searching, and email/print functions. What makes it special is it's robust pdf annotation features.
There's highlighting, underlining, squiggly underlining, strikeout, text insertion marking, and text replacement marking - all with color wheel color selection. There's a typewriter feature that lets you add text anywhere on a page. There's also a popup note function that records your note and inserts an icon wherever you tap. The popup note can be color-coded as well and has several icons you can select from (question mark, key, edit mark, triangle or delta to name a few). Finally, there's also drawing tools to add lines, arrows, circles/ovals, and squares/rectangles, plus a freehand tool for drawing or writing. The drawing tools all let you select color, line size, and transparency.
So what else makes it special? Any annotations that are added can also be deleted. You can encrypt the file if you need that level of security. If multiple people are reviewing the same file, the current annotator's name can be set in the, wait for it, Settings. If you want to send the annotated file to someone who doesn't have GoodReader, you can flatten the pdf, which will embed the annotations into the main pdf body page. Another nice feature is that you can add your mark-ups to the existing file or created an annotated copy.
And there's more! It does pdf to text conversion. The vendor provides fairly good online documentation, which a lot of app developers don't seem to think is important. There are consistent upgrades that improve the functionality of the product and you can pull files to annotate from iCloud, Dropbox, Google Docs, SugarSync, IMAP or POP3 mail servers, WebDAV servers, or FTP/SFTP servers.
Now we know it can't be perfect… and it's not. Here are some of the cons. It's not free. But it's not exorbitantly expensive at $4.99. The iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch versions are two different applications, which is a big no-no in my book. However, I only use it on my iPad because I can't imagine trying to annotate on an iPhone/iPod Touch screen. And, as alerted above, it's not available on non-iOS mobile devices or in a desktop version.
With all of this, GoodReader has gotten very good to excellent reviews by the likes of PC Magazine, Macworld, and CNET. Why not give it a try and let us know what you think?
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