Friday, March 11, 2011

Wargaming,.pdf's and iPads

Recently I was able to purchase an iPad with some money received for my birthday.  One of my main reasons for getting an iPad was to use it for wargaming.  Not so much as a device to roll dice or anything but to take all of the .pdf rules I have acquired with me, instead of printing the rules out, punching holes in the pages and putting them in a binder etc..
To start with I had to pick out a .pdf reader for the iPad, since Adobe and Apple do not mix.  After about an hour of searching through different sites that rated Apps for the iPad, I settled on Goodreader.  A nice little app for reading .pdfs and it was well rated.  Once downloaded I started moving over my files.  It was all very easy and I was able to set up different folders for each rule set and their corresponding supplements.  I then started to look at them all to see if there was any format issues.  On some the pictures and part of the text wasn't visible.  A little dismayed I started searching the net and asking around on some of the Yahoo Groups I belong to for answers.  After a few hours I found a fix and here it is:
The issue with invisible text in some of the .pdf's stems from a JPEG2000 file format.  Whatever the reason, I'm not a techno geek so I can't explain it, these files don't work well with .pdf's.
So the work around for this little problem works on the MAC and I don't have a work around for Windows.  On your MAC open the .pdf file in question with the text editor not with adobe or some other .pdf reader.  Once opened rename the file something different with the .pdf extension.  After that is done transfer it to the iPad and you're all set.
Somehow the resaving of the file with a different name changes the JPEG2000 file into something else.  Again, I'm not a techno geek so I can't totally explain it but it works.

I hope this post will help someone else in the future who may end up doing the same thing with their iPad.

2 comments:

  1. Good information and you got a lot more for your birthday than I did:D

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  2. Good article, very useful for the many ipad owners out there. I did this trick for a bunch of pdf's lately. It works but drawback is the filesize increases significantly and it is a bit slower turning pages. Then again, it works!

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