Read PDFs on iOS devices

Some people think paid-for apps need to be installed in order to store, organise and read PDFs on their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch – but that isn’t the case.

In fact, as we’ll show in this workshop, it is easy to get PDF documents onto an iOS device and open them in iBooks, Apple’s book-reader app, which can be used to read them, zoom in and out, find text and so on. Then, when you’ve finished, you can leave them safely on the iBooks bookshelf for later.

Step 1
Make sure you have downloaded and installed Apple’s iBooks app – this is a free download from the App Store. Although it’s possible to import publications stored in Adobe’s popular PDF format using Apple’s iTunes program for desktop computers, it’s a long-winded process. Instead, it’s often easier to send them to yourself as email attachments in the normal way and then open the Mail program and tap the mail message to open it. Scroll down to the bottom of the message and you’ll see the PDF is attached at the bottom, together with its name and file size. 
 

Step 2
If you tap the PDF icon it’ll open in the iOS Quick Look viewer, which is fine if you just need to look at a document once to check something. However, if you’d like to keep the PDF handy so you can refer back to it, tap and hold the PDF icon and, when the pop-up menu appears, tap the Open in iBooks button. After a moment, the iBooks app will launch and display the PDF full screen. You can now double-tap to zoom in and out, swipe left and right to move between pages and so on.
 

Step 3
You can also use iBooks’ controls along the top to display large PDFs as thumbnails, email or print them out, change the screen brightness, search for text in the PDF, or bookmark a particular page so you can come back to it later. This makes it a really good way to read and navigate PDFs. When you’re finished, tap the Library button at the top-left corner and you’ll see that the PDF we’ve been looking at is stored safely on the shelf, where you can view it any time you like.