GoodReader App - My Favorite for PDF Viewing and Editing

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.
• Background - you can change the background from light to dark for ease of reading.
• Rotate - You can change the orientation of the PDF, say if it imported landscape rather than portrait. 
• Page - You can change how you view your PDF one page at a time, or two pages side-by-side. 
• Crop - you can crop the pages of your PDF. This affects all pages in your document. This might be useful if your PDF came with margins that were too large.
• Lock - you can lock the screen so that you can’t advance to the next page by mistake. Simply pressing the lock icon gets you back to normal viewing.
• Send - this button allows you to access all of the export features from the PDF view screen. In addition to the other options we talked about, you can print from here.  We’ll talk about the Summary in a bit. 
• Text - Again, the difference between Goodreader and something like Notability, is that Goodeader recognizes text within PDF’s. In fact, by pressing this key you can see all of the text in your document displayed as plain text. This screen allows you to do some interesting stuff, like scroll slowly at reading speed or copy the entire page of text to your clipboard.  Recognizing text also importantly allows you to
• Search - you can search for keywords in this text only screen or go back and search in PDF view by hitting the My Documents arrow. Searching will highlight your term in blue and then you can move to the previous instances of that term or the next instance of that term using these controls.  Now let’s talk about

PDF Annotation or Editing

This is where I really think Goodreader shines. You have lots of ways to annotate your file and you can get to these features one of two ways. You can highlight the text that you want to affect and then choose from the options:  you can add a comment, which looks like this. You can choose to highlight and then go back and change the color of the highlight.  You can underline. You can squiggle line. You can strike through. You can make an addition. Or strike through with an addition. Also, you can add a bunch of different shapes: lines, arrows, boxes, circles or a freeform drawing.  And there is an eraser to clean up your drawing.  Everything else can be altered or manipulated after the fact with lots of options.  

The other way that you can make these edits is through the right hand tool bar, which you can pin to the screen so that it doesn’t go away after a couple of beats.  There is one additional option here — you can bookmark a page. Everything else that you saw while highlighting you can do here, but the difference is that the option becomes persistent if you turn it on using the right tool bar.  In other words, by highlighting text and choosing, you are only affecting that text. If instead, you choose the highlighting tool over here on the toolbar, then you can make a bunch of highlights on the page before saving them all.  Same with all of the other text editing tools. The drawing tools are a one shot deal.  After you create one arrow, you’ll have to hit the button again to create another.  Now let’s talk about some of what I consider the

Cool Features: 

• Export annotations - once you have spent time highlighting and annotating the text in your PDF, you can export all of those highlights in an email. That is what Goodreader considers a Summary.  You can do the same for Bookmarks or Outlines, but that requires that your PDF had an outline coded into it when it was imported. I have a whole video showing how I export highlighted passages into a citation spreadsheet if you are interested.  
• Manipulating Pages - this button has lots of functions built into it. You can delete pages, add new ones (this is how you add a blank page), move pages around, stitch together two PDFs (they call that append), extract select pages from the larger document into a new file, rotate select pages, or split the PDF into two separate files.  Lots of very cool stuff that comes in handy, even if you aren’t using the annotation features. 
• Speak - if you highlight a passage of text and select Speak, Goodreader will read it to you in a robotic voice. I use this sometimes!  It’s obviously not as good as an actual person reading it, but sometimes I need to get dinner on the table AND read a seven page PDF.  This allows me to multitask. And finally,
• Link - back here in Manage Files, you can copy a link to your PDF. What this means is that if you are working on your iPad, you can click on this link and your iPad or iPhone will open up Goodreader and go straight to this file.  I’ll show you from this email. Just click on the link and voila!

I wish that GoodReader did a couple of other things like converting photos to PDFs and allowing you to create a table of contents or outline, but it has by far the best PDF annotation  functionality that I’ve found in an iOS app. Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!