GoodReader App Tutorial - My Favorite PDF Annotation App
In this video, I’ll take you on a quick tour of my favorite iOS PDF reader and manipulator, the GoodReader app.
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*** A truncated transcript follows. A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. ***
Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll take you on a quick tour of my favorite iOS PDF reader and manipulator, the GoodReader app.
There are a billion apps out there that will allow you to view and edit PDFs. I use Notability if I need to draw on PDFs, but if I want to interact with the text in a PDF, GoodReader is by far my favorite and has the most robust functionality that I have found. It definitely trades simplicity for function, so although it does almost everything, it can feel complicated AND some functions are kind of buried, so it helps to have someone show you all the things it can do. So, this is my whirlwind tour. Here we go! First, let’s talk about
Getting PDFs into GoodReader
Goodreader offers lots of ways to get PDFs into the app. I almost always use iOS’s intra-app exchange system. Meaning that when I am in Safari and viewing a PDF, I simply hit the share button and choose to open the PDF in GoodReader. This is available in Safari, email, text, Notability and really any other app where you might be viewing a PDF. You can also import PDFs from iCloud, if you’ve saved them there in advance. Goodreader also supports a bunch of other options including computer to computer and Wi-Fi transfer. These are all kind of complicated and I don’t find them necessary for my level of use.
File Management
Once you have your PDF in GoodReader, the app has a lot of file management functionality. Since I use GoodReader as a viewing and editing app only — meaning that I export and store my PDFs somewhere else after editing them — these are not functions that I use a lot. Nevertheless, let me show you all the file management features GoodReader provides.
You can create lots of new folders and then folders within folders to store your PDFs. You can create a PDF from scratch or a new text file. I’m not super sure why you would want to do this, but it IS an option. In order to delete a PDF just swipe to the left.
To reveal additional file management features, choose manage Files and then select which file or files that you want to affect.
You can see all the new features that are revealed. You can copy your PDF, move it to a different folder, rename it, zip it so it takes up less space, mark it as unread (the titles for unread PDFs are blue, whereas PDFs that you have read are in black), and you can star your PDF with an array of colors – this is Goodreader’s form of tagging and gives you a way to go back and find files later through this starred screen. You can protect your PDF with a password, copy a link to your PDF to the clipboard, and flatten all the annotations. Flattening means that Goodreader keeps all of your annotations as images, but won’t allow you to edit them further within a flattened file.
In order to find PDFs you can use the Find panel to type keywords for the title, look at all of your recent documents, or find all of the documents that you have starred in different colors.
Export Files:
This screen is also where you can find ways to export your PDFs or get them out of GoodReader. I can’t figure out why they have organized the buttons this way, but all of the export buttons seem to be mixed in with everything else.
Email - You can email your PDF when you push this option, Goodreader wants to know whether you want to send it “as is” (meaning that whoever is receiving it will be able to manipulate your annotations using their own Goodreader app) or flatten the annotations into images.
Open in… – You can choose to open your PDF in another app.
Export - you can export your file to your iCloud drive.
Upload - finally, you can upload your PDF to a file server like Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive if you have that connection already set up in the Connect panel.
PDF Viewing
OK, let’s go onto viewing PDFs. Open up your PDF and you can see that all of your open PDFs are in tabs across the top. In addition, you have two tool bars — one across the bottom and one on the right-hand side. These disappear in a couple of seconds to give you more screen for reading, but you just have to tap the center the screen to get all of those options back.
Reading works intuitively — you just have to swipe to the left to advance to the next page much like you would on a Kindle. You can also use this page slider in order to get there faster in a long document. . .