How to read a PDF on an iPhone without pinching and zooming

A PDF is a picture of a printed page. On a phone that page is tiny, so you zoom in, pan across each line and zoom out again. Here is what actually helps.

Why PDFs are hard to read on a phone

A PDF keeps every letter exactly where the printer wanted it: the same line breaks, the same wide margins, the same running headers and page numbers. That is perfect on paper and awkward on a 6-inch screen. The text is small, the margins waste a third of the width, and nothing reflows when you change the font size.

Option 1: keep the pages, but trim the margins

If you want the book to look as the publisher made it, the cheapest fix is to cut away the empty white space at the left and right of each page so the text can be shown larger. Peony does this for PDFs that open as pages: it looks at where the text actually sits across the book and shows only that area. Your file is never changed, and there is a switch in the settings if you prefer the full page. At night, Peony can also show PDF pages inverted, light text on a dark page, instead of a bright white sheet.

Option 2: turn the PDF into a real ebook

The better fix for a book, a long article or a paper is to convert the PDF to an EPUB, the format ebooks use. An EPUB reflows: the text fits your screen at any size, you choose the font size, theme and alignment, and the reader remembers your place. Peony converts a PDF this way when you add it. Along the way it removes the running headers, footers and page numbers that interrupt the text, keeps headings, footnotes and code listings, and turns tables into real tables. How the conversion works, and what it cannot do.

Option 3: let the phone read it to you

Once a PDF is an EPUB, you can have it read aloud with the voices already on your iPhone, with the sentence underlined as you listen and the screen locked. See listening to an EPUB on your iPhone.

Which should you pick?

Mostly text (novels, non-fiction, manuals, papers): convert to EPUB.
Layout matters (forms, maps, sheet music, slides, heavy diagrams): keep it as pages with trimmed margins.
A scan of a printed book: Peony can recognise the text first, see reading a scanned PDF as an ebook.

A note on privacy

Reading never needs a connection or an account. Converting a PDF does send that one file to this site's server, which converts it and deletes it afterwards; you can switch conversion off in Peony's settings and PDFs then open as pages and nothing is sent. The privacy policy has the details.

Peony is on the App Store: get it for your iPhone.

More guides

Peony is an iPhone app for reading EPUB and PDF books you already own. See the home page, the FAQ and the privacy policy.