Sometimes you need to reduce the size of a PDF file. There’s no need to use Adobe Acrobat or other professional PDF editing tools.
Just open the PDF file in Preview, go to File –> Export and select the option to reduce the file size, as in the screenshot.
I like apps that don’t get in the way. I like them even more when they do their job properly.
Scanbot 3.0 for iPhone belongs to this category. This app does two things:
To the best of my knowledge this is the only app that can do both things seamlessly and without changing the user interface between the two modes.
Seldom I find a QR code to scan, but I’m that type of person that thinks that having a dedicated QR code reading app on my iPhone is a waste. Having an app that does both things is liberating.
The main screen is extremely minimalistic, but in the case of a document scanning app this is godsend. The interface has only five buttons:
Scanbot 3.0 can automatically upload your PDF files to Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, Evernote and other common cloud providers. The most interesting fact about version 3.0 of Scanbot is that this app is iCloud Drive ready. This means that once OS X Yosemite is released, the app will be able to upload the scanned files directly to your Mac without using any 3rd party tools.
The app . There is also an in-app purchase option to unlock some Pro features:
The Pro features cost an additional EUR 4.49, which is totally worth it if you need OCR text recognition and some additional flexibility with filenames.
Readers of this blog know that for many years my go-to choice for iOS PDF scanning has been (my review here) ,but after testing Scanbot 3.0 Pro for a few days I’m willing to place it on my home screen.
This is a very well made app, and the developers deserve our support.
In a recent thought-provocative post titled “Where does Tim Cook store his PDF files” I argued that if you live in the Apple world and don’t rely on 3rd party software, it’s very difficult to have a unified solution to store and sync PDF files.
I concluded that post with the hope that OS X Mavericks and iBooks would solve the problem. In this post I’ll discuss where we stand.
Right now you can store PDF files in the iCloud space of:
iBooks is very elegant and finally users can store books in PDF in a separate application from iTunes.
The confusion of this system is that:
Confusing eh?
My take on all this is twofold. Firstly, Preview.app remains the default open-all-files application in OS X. It would have been overkill to duplicate Preview features in iBooks. In this way iBooks can remain a streamlined application to only store and organize iBooks and PDF files.
Secondly, synchronisation remains an open discussion. There are two reasons for this:
We can look at the two previous considerations in two different opposite ways.
During the presentation of iCloud Steve Jobs said that Apple was demoting the Mac to a normal device. The centre, the truth if you will, of all documents is iCloud. iCloud sync is robust enough to allow Apple to introduce iCloud sync in iBooks also for PDF files in the near future. The days of iTunes sync are definitely counted now.
The alternative solution would be to have AirDrop extended to allow document transfers between OS X and iOS. The question is if Apple sees this solution worth the effort. If this is Apple’s preferred solution we might have to wait another year for the release of iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 (?).
In the meantime I’ll continue storing my PDF books in iBooks and sync through iTunes.
iBooks collections work in a peculiar way with PDF files. iBooks is iOS’s app to purchase books from Apple but also to store and view PDF files.
Because the app is available for both the iPhone and the iPad you might think that whenever you upload a PDF file on one device, you will find it on the other too. Unfortunately this is not the case:
Sync collections for PDF files work only after you manually upload your files to each device separately.
After you enable Sync Collections in iOS Settings, .
First of all, the PDF files themselves are stored in iCloud. That means that if you delete the iBooks app from your iPad and then install it again, you won’t have to upload those PDF files again. This is pretty handy if you want to use iCloud to store your PDF files.
The same thing happens if you get a new iPad. Just install the iBooks app and your PDF files will be available in the app.
Collections – but in this context it’s better to call them simply folders – are synced across devices. For example, provided you have manually uploaded the same PDF file in two devices, if you move the file in a specific folder (i.e. collection), the same thing is going to happen on the other device, via iCloud.
iBooks also syncs bookmarks across devices, provided you have uploaded the same files on the devices you want to sync.
In one sentence, iBooks Collections synchronize the organization and bookmarks of your iBooks across devices, it does not synchronize documents – with the exception of books purchased on the iBooks store.
I’ve been working on a screencast about PDFpen for iPad for about a month. I started with the idea that it would be no more than 20 minutes. It ended up over 48 minutes. So much for that plan.
MacSparky has posted a great 48 minutes screencast on how to use PDFpen for iPad. If you have read David’s book Paperless you already know that he uses PDFpen on both his Mac and iPad to add notes to PDF files and transfer them between the two platforms.
Good software and even better screencast.
I recently printed a Mail message as a PDF file and chose iCloud as the destination. I thought it would show up in Preview’s iCloud file storage but it’s not there. Nor is it in the Pages file storage. Any idea of where it is and how I can get to it?
iCloud is a work in progress. The more I use it and the more issues like this I find.
Fletcher Penney describes his PDF workflow for medical journals.
It comprises apps like , , Tagger and the army knife Dropbox. My needs are simpler than that but I like the fact that many people are simply using a folder structure to organise their data. If you use the file system it’s less likely that you’ll be stuck with some proprietary solution.
How do you organise your data and how do you synchronise it with your iOS devices?