Transferring files

Problem:

WiFi File Transfer doesn't work

All my WiFi traffic becomes extremely slow when I'm in GoodReader, WiFi connection often breaks, and my device even forgets my WiFi network

I use GoodReader's built-in web-browser and some links don't work when I tap them

I connect via WiFi using my web-browser and I see something like "Error 501/505, HTTP version is not supported"

When I browse a secure web-site in Safari, I'm asked about untrusted certificates, and in GoodReader I can't browse this site at all

Viewing PDF files

Problem:

I cannot close a file, because navigation menu has disappeared

My PDF is not very large, but it either crashes GoodReader every time I try to open it, or renders indefinitely

I see blank pages in my PDF file, but it shows fine on my Mac/PC

I see almost all of my PDF file contents, except for some pictures, which are shown fine on my Mac/PC

I see scrambled text in my PDF, but it shows fine on my Mac/PC

My PDF takes extremely long time to open or to render a page

The Asian (Chinese in particular) text in my PDF is unreadable, but it shows fine on my Mac/PC

My PDF opens fine on my Mac/PC, but GoodReader shows a single page saying something like "This file can be opened with Adobe Acrobat 9"

I see the text on my PDF page, but PDF Reflow feature doesn't show this text

I see the text on my PDF page, but PDF Find feature can't find it

I see the text on my PDF page, but PDF Reflow feature shows some unreadable characters instead of it

My right-to-left reading PDF file (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) is shown backwards in PDF Reflow mode

I see the text in my right-to-left reading PDF file (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), but PDF Find feature can't find it, although it does find it if I enter it backwards

GoodReader says that this PDF format is not recognized, but it shows fine on my Mac/PC

I often find myself making accidental double-taps, when I don't mean to

I'm unable to use Horizontal Scroll Lock feature, because the button is inaccessible (grayed out)

I plug in video out adapter, but nothing appears on my external display

Viewing TXT files

Problem:

I cannot close a file, because navigation menu has disappeared

My TXT file shows unreadable characters instead of a real text

I plug in video out adapter, but nothing appears on my external display

Viewing other files

Problem:

I cannot close a file, because navigation menu has disappeared

My MS Office files crash GoodReader

My MS Office files are shown a little bit incorrectly - text is off-place, formatting is different, etc.

My iWork'08/09 files don't open or open incorrectly

I plug in video out adapter, but nothing appears on my external display

Other

Problem:

GoodReader tried to open some file and crashed. Now I can't even start it, because it crashes every time trying to open that file on startup.

I forgot my app password

I plug in video out adapter, but nothing appears on my external display

Some other problem that is not listed here

Please check if you have Bluetooth option turned on in main device Settings. If yes, turn it off. It's a known issue that WiFi connection on iOS 3.2 and 4 has a conflict with Bluetooth option when it's turned on, even if you don't have any actual Bluetooth device connected. We have reported this issue to Apple and we hope that they'll fix it soon. Meanwhile try to turn Bluetooth option off when using WiFi connection.

GoodReader uses very simple built-in web-browser, it's much simpler than Safari. This browser sometimes can't determine links if they're using pop-up windows or some fancy JavaScript code. However, there's an easy workaround that works in many cases. Tap the link and hold it for a while. System menu will pop up with the choice of actions. Select Open action. The link should open. If it doesn't open, select Copy (this will copy the URL address to clipboard) and then press Follow the Link from Clipboard button:

GoodReader uses HTTP/1.1 for WiFi communication. There are some important features that were not present in HTTP/1.0. If you see HTTP 505 error, it means that your browser tries to connect using HTTP/1.0 protocol, which is not supported by GoodReader.

You can adjust your web-browser settings to use HTTP/1.1 instead of HTTP/1.0. However, instead of doing this, please consider using "professional" WiFi transfer technique, where this issue will not be relevant.

GoodReader uses very simple built-in web-browser, it's much simpler than Safari. While Safari is capable of intercepting untrusted certificate notifications, very simple browser used by GoodReader is not capable of such thing. Therefore it is not possible to browse secure web-sites with untrusted certificates with simple GoodReader's browser. Sorry about that.

The navigation menu with a back button has disappeared to give you more reading space. To bring this menu back, quickly tap in the middle of the screen (this applies to every file type).

There's a very special case with PDF files, when tapping in the middle of the screen is not desirable. For example, the middle of the screen can be occupied by a big PDF Link, which will take you to a very different place if you tap it. For cases like this we have provided another way to turn the navigation menu on/off - a quick tap with three fingers anywhere on the screen (works with PDF files only).

First of all, please hard-reboot your device (with powering off). Sometimes it solves the problem. If it doesn't help, please read the following instructions.

While we use our own PDF viewing engine, we still have to use Apple's PDF parsing and rendering engine, which is a part of iOS. Unfortunately, this engine either crashes on certain PDF files or hangs on them. These cases are very rare, and we have notified Apple of this issue. We hope that they will fix it someday.

However, there's a very simple workaround for this, if you have a Mac computer.

Open this PDF file in Mac's standard Preview application, go to File menu and select Save As command. Then resave this file as a new PDF (just make sure to change a file name, to preserve the original file unchanged). The new PDF file will be formatted in iOS-friendly way.

There are two main reasons for this:

• JPEG2000 image compression. This compression used in some PDF files can't be understood by current versions of iOS (and GoodReader heavily relies on its capabilities). However, there's a very easy workaround for that.
  • If you have a Mac computer, open this PDF file in Mac's standard Preview application, go to File menu and select Save As command. Then resave this file as a new PDF (just make sure to change a file name, to preserve the original file unchanged). The new PDF file will be formatted in iOS-friendly way.
  • If you have a PC computer, the solution would be to reassemble a file in Adobe Acrobat software (or other) replacing JPEG2000 image compression with more conventional JPEG. Print your file to a special Adobe PDF printer (installed by Acrobat). Make sure that inside this printer's settings, on Images tab two first Compression fields don't show JPEG2000. If they do, change them to JPEG.
• Incompatible encryption. GoodReader heavily relies on iOS capabilities. Current versions of iOS can't understand the 256-bit AES encryption used in some PDF files. There are two solutions:
  • remove encryption completely. Use Adobe Acrobat or special encryption removal software, for example, this: A-PDF Restrictions Remover
  • change an encryption method to a more compatible one. Use Adobe Acrobat for that.

The reason is JPEG2000 image compression. This compression used in some PDF files can't be understood by current versions of iOS (and GoodReader heavily relies on its capabilities).

However, there's a very easy workaround for that.

If you have a Mac computer, open this PDF file in Mac's standard Preview application, go to File menu and select Save As command. Then resave this file as a new PDF (just make sure to change a file name, to preserve the original file unchanged). The new PDF file will be formatted in iOS-friendly way.

If you have a PC computer, the solution would be to reassemble a file in Adobe Acrobat software (or other) replacing JPEG2000 image compression with more conventional JPEG. Print your file to a special Adobe PDF printer (installed by Acrobat). Make sure that inside this printer's settings, on Images tab two first Compression fields don't show JPEG2000. If they do, change them to JPEG.

Symptoms: in rare cases some particular fonts are rendered incorrectly, showing a scrambled text, and you can even see that the text itself changes when you change the zoom ratio. It happens due to a certain bug in older versions of iPhone OS. The good news is that this problem was solved by Apple in iOS 4. For iPad owners this is a delayed good news, because at the time of writing this iOS 4 was not available for iPads yet (but expected soon).

iPhone/iPad is a relatively slow device, compared to a desktop computer. And PDF format is very complex, it allows to format its internal data in a variety of ways. Some of those ways are what we call "iPhone-unfriendly", meaning that they overload iPhone's processor with a lot of unnecessary calculations.

However, there's a very simple workaround for this. If you have a Mac computer, open this PDF file in Mac's standard Preview application, go to File menu and select Save As command. Then resave this file as a new PDF (just make sure to change a file name, to preserve the original file unchanged). The new PDF file will be formatted in iPhone-friendly way. Unfortunately, we're unaware of a Windows-based solution for this issue.

The reason - fonts are not embedded into a PDF file. iOS has only limited subset of Asian fonts inside of it.

There's a very easy workaround for this. You have to embed all fonts into a PDF file.

If you have a Mac computer, open this PDF file in Mac's standard Preview application, go to File menu and select Save As command. Then resave this file as a new PDF (just make sure to change a file name, to preserve the original file unchanged). The new PDF file will contain all fonts.

If you have a PC computer, the solution would be to reassemble a file in Adobe Acrobat software embedding all fonts into it. Print your file to a special Adobe PDF printer (installed by Acrobat). Make sure that inside this printer's settings, on Fonts tab Embed all fonts checkbox is on.

If you're currently on the go, and desktop computer is not available, but you need an urgent access to a file with missing fonts, use PDF Reflow feature.

You are probably trying to open a PDF Portfolio file.

PDF Portfolios are supported, but not for a direct reading, like it happens in Adobe Acrobat 9 or later. PDF Portfolios are complex PDF files with a very simple first page (usually it says something like "This file can be opened with Adobe Acrobat 9"), and a set of many PDF files embedded into this file, which is used simply as a container for other PDF files. GoodReader lets you extract those files from a PDF Portfolio for further reading them as normal PDF files. Due to a specific technology used for this extraction, every file must be fully loaded into memory before extraction, so very large embedded files will not be extracted.

The most probable reason is that you're seeing a scanned page. Please note that scanned page is not a textual information - it's a picture.

Modern PDF-creating software often includes the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) information when creating PDFs from scanned pages. In such cases PDF Reflow may show you a valid text, but that's not always the case, many scanned PDFs don't have any textual information.

Here are possible reasons for this:

• the page is a scanned page. Please note that scanned page is not a textual information - it's a picture.
• if your search string contains whitespaces, it may be the problem, because extracted text may contain no whitespaces or several whitespaces where there's just one in your search string. Try to avoid using whitespaces in search strings.
• the text was not extracted correctly from a PDF page. Please note that correct extraction of pure text from a PDF page is not always possible. Use PDF Reflow feature to see how exactly the text was extracted. If you see that the text was extracted incorrectly, we encourage you to send this sample file to our customer support service for further examining. Extracting text from PDFs requires some heuristics, so we might come up with better extracting solution after studying your file.

You may see a scanned page, and PDF Reflow may extract textual information provided by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine of PDF creating software. Optical Character Recognition engine sometimes produces strange character sequences when it's uncertain about which character exactly it sees.

Some PDF files with right-to-left fonts instead of encoding text as they should - from right to left - actually contain text stored in left-to-right (i.e. reversed) order. GoodReader extracts text in the order as it appears in PDF file, which makes it look backwards in Reflow mode. We're still working on this issue. Please keep in mind that this problem is created by PDF creating software, which doesn't store text inside PDF in the correct order.

Some PDF files with right-to-left fonts actually contain characters stored in left-to-right (i.e. reversed) order. To be able to find text in such files, the search string must be entered backwards. Use the Flip search string switch in PDF section of Application Settings to enter search string in readable form, and it will be flipped backwards internally during the search.

The file could get damaged during file transfer process. Please check the file size and see if it matches the size of the original file. In any case try to delete a file and reupload it to GoodReader.

If reuploading file doesn't help, we encourage you to send this sample file to our customer support service for further examining.

You can turn Double-tap for zooming option off in PDF section of Applications Settings. This option also controls the single tap with two fingers gesture for zooming out.

Horizontal Scroll Lock feature only makes sense when you do vertical page turns. Therefore it is automatically disabled when you either turn the Horizontal swipe option on in Application Settings, or when you select a double-page layout for a PDF file (selecting a double-page layout automatically turns horizontal page swiping on).

Simply plugging in the adapter is not enough. You also have to press a special button on the main screen of GoodReader.

Please also note that while some of our customers report successful usage of video cables with various iPhone and iPod touch devices, we were only able to achieve reliable results with iPad and iPhone 4.

In order to read TXT files you have to select the correct Text Encoding first. This can be done in Viewing TXT files section of the Application Settings page, which can be opened with this button:

Unlike with PDF and TXT files, for which we wrote our own viewers, we use iOS's built-in viewing engine for MS Office files. This engine is not able to open large MS Office files.

The solution would be to convert your MS Office files to PDFs. Huge PDF files are not a problem for GoodReader.

Unlike with PDF and TXT files, for which we wrote our own viewers, we use iOS's built-in viewing engine for MS Office files. This engine sometimes shows MS Office files incorrectly.

The best solution would be to convert your MS Office files to PDFs. In this case you will solve the incorrect appearance problem, plus you'll get the ability to use our Find Text in PDF files feature and other PDF-specific features.

iWork'08/09 files must be saved with Include Preview option.

Open main device Settings, look for GoodReader settings there. Turn the Don't open anything switch on and restart GoodReader - this time it will not try to reopen the problematic file.

That's bad, because the only way to reset a password is to delete and reinstall the app. Please note that you will also be deleting all files stored inside GoodReader when deleting the app. In the future please try to do two important things: don't forget your pasword, and keep copies of your valuable files in a safe place on your desktop computer, just in case.

Our friendly and experienced customer support service will be happy to answer all your questions and to solve all kinds of problems that you might experience when using our software. Please make sure that your spam-filters wouldn't block mail from goodreader.net and goodiware.com mail domains.