Part 2 of the review | Reviews Home | Communicator Home

The portable document format (PDF) is one which seems to be ever increasing in its popularity. This is probably down to the fact that there are viewers for many platforms and the structure of the format itself. The format allows for a file to be constructed so that it will look the same wherever it is viewed, or on whatever it is printed. As an example the format provides the ability to specify a specific font and even embed it within the file.

The format supports text, images, tables and other features. The format also allows you to specify the copy properties of the file - i.e. no printing, no editing, and no selecting of text allowed is user configurable. As a result depending on the properties of the file text and pictures can be changed, copied or printed. Almost every scientific journal and lots of hardware and software manuals are currently available as PDF documents. For example many of the Nokia 9210's manual or documentation are provided in the PDF format. As well as those found on the CD that comes with the Nokia 9210 many more are available from the Nokia website (for example on how to set up WAP settings).

You can read more about the PDF format at Adobe's website. You can also download Acrobat Reader for windows there, and investigate the programs that can be used to make PDF files.

Thanks to mBrainSoftware a PDF viewer was made available for the EPOC platform. This was first first released for ER5 and ER3. Currently the program is being ported to the 9210. Although the internal programming (such as document rendering) remains largely unchanged, the GUI of the program has been changed to the style of the 9210. Thanks to the author I have been testing an early beta of the 9210 program. This review highlights and evaluates the features of the program. Please note that changes are likely to be made before final release. I hope to update the document if there are any significant changes.

As can be seen from the above screenshots Pdf+ does an excellent job of viewing PDF files. Without a doubt the best viewer for any portable platform it has near equal functionality of the Windows viewer. It renders document very quickly and make PDF files both quick and easy to read. The major features of the program are:

• print the text, line drawings and bit maps in the pdf files.
• copy selected parts of the text to other applications.
• view and follow bookmarks.
• follow links to other pages in the document.
• follow URL's.
• read files protected with an user password.

The main features accessible by the command buttons are Next (which views the next page of the document), Find (which searches for text in the document), Goto (choose a page to jump to), and Bookmarks (view the Bookmarks of the file and use them to navigate round a document).

The Goto commands is especially useful in the longer documents. For example you can read the contents list of a document on its first page, tap the goto command button, fill in the page number and tap the OK command button, thus navigating round a file with minimum key and tap strokes.

Bookmarks are the 'content list like' feature of PDF files that allow you to quickly jump between different sections of a file. The bookmarks will vary from file to file but are often present for each chapter of section.

The file menu allows you access to other functions. From here you can open a file which uses the standard file open dialog. Printing of files is also supported by Pdf+. The printed files will often be even better that those on screen since if you print via a PC more fonts can be used.

Print preview uses the standard dialog too, so you can get some idea of what the document printed out will look like.

Under the more section of the File menu you get Export to Text file. This is only allowed if the documents security settings allow the copying of text. On the whole the export of text works very well. However since text files do not support the formatting of placement of text in pdf files results can sometimes look a little strange with titles skewed to the left or right for example. What is does mean is that text can easily be got out of a file that can then be used for in word or any other text editing program.

As mentioned before PDF files have different security settings. Information about these, and other properties of a document can be found in the Document Info dialog. Information here includes the file name, file size, creation date, creation program, security settings (can the document be printed, changed, text and graphics selected and notes added), and more such as PDF version of the file (the PDF format comes in several version with 1.3 being most recent).

Please continue reading about PDF in part two of this review.