Jim Chapman
New Member
PDF support has been on my 'to do' list for a while (since 2009 actually). The reason for not doing it yet is that it's complicated. There isn't any good documentation for the details of the PDF format, and under the hood it comes with quite a lot of different variants. Depending how the PDF content is represented, it can sometimes be very hard to figure out how to display it on a screen size (or screen aspect ratio) that's different from the one that was used for creating the document. The only 'official' libraries for parsing PDF are very expensive, and the available free libraries and sample code are not very good - meaning that for some PDF documents they would produce really terrible layout.@Jim Chapman
Any chance we will get PDF support? That is the only thing keeping me from choosing a reader app.
I could easily produce a Freda build that would achieve decent layout for 99% of PDF documents ... but it would make a mess of the remaining 1%. And the problem is that every time a user tried to read a document that was in that 1%, they would give Freda a bad "can't read my book" one-star review. Result: Freda's store rating drops through the floor.
Conclusion: it's only worth doing if I can do it perfectly, and I so far haven't figured out a way to do it perfectly.
In the meantime, I recommend using Calibre ebook library manager to convert your PDFs to EPUB; it normally does a decent job of the conversion.