Our extremely friendly and experienced customer support service will be happy to answer all your questions and to solve all kinds of problems that you might experience when using our software.
Transferring files
Problem:
WiFi File Transfer doesn't work
I use GoodReader's built-in web-browser and some links don't work when I tap them
Viewing PDF files
Problem:
I cannot close a file, because navigation menu has disappeared
My PDF is not very large, but it crashes GoodReader every time I try to open it
I see blank pages in my PDF file, but it shows fine on my Mac/PC
I see scrambled text in my PDF, but it shows fine on my Mac/PC
My PDF takes extremely long time to open or to render a page
The Asian (Chinese in particular) text in my PDF is unreadable, but it shows fine on my Mac/PC
I see the text on my PDF page, but PDF Reflow feature doesn't show this text
I see the text on my PDF page, but PDF Find feature can't find it
I see the text on my PDF page, but PDF Reflow feature shows some unreadable characters instead of it
My right-to-left reading PDF file (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) is shown backwards in PDF Reflow mode
GoodReader says that this PDF format is not recognized, but it shows fine on my Mac/PC
I often find myself making accidental double-taps, when I don't mean to
Viewing TXT files
Problem:
I cannot close a file, because navigation menu has disappeared
My TXT file shows unreadable characters instead of a real text
My right-to-left reading TXT file (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) shows backwards in GoodReader
Viewing other files
Problem:
I cannot close a file, because navigation menu has disappeared
My MS Office files crash GoodReader
My iWork'08/09 files don't open or open incorrectly
Other
Problem:
Some other problem that is not listed here
Detailed troubleshooting guide with screenshots can be found here: www.goodreader.net/goodreader.html (visit this page from your computer and find "WiFi File Transfer" link on the left side of the page)
iPhone OS treats GoodReader and GoodReader Lite as 2 totally different apps. No iPhone app may access another app's internal storage space (called "sandbox"). That's simply impossible. This is how iPhone OS is designed. Therefore you have to transfer your files from your computer (if you have them there) to the full version of the app manually via WiFi. If you don't have those files on your computer, you can use the same WiFi transfer technique to transfer files from the Lite version to your computer first, then re-transfer those files to the full version.
If your computer is not available at the moment, but you have some online storage facility like MobileMe iDisk or box.net available, you can upload files there from the Lite app, and download them to the full app.
GoodReader uses very simple built-in web-browser, it's much simpler than Safari. This browser sometimes can't determine links if they're using pop-up windows or some fancy JavaScript code. However, there's an easy workaround that works in many cases (it requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later). Tap the link and hold it for a while. System menu will pop up with the choice of actions. Select Open action. The link should open. If it doesn't open, select Copy (this will copy the URL address to clipboard) and then press Follow the Link from Clipboard button:
GoodReader uses HTTP/1.1 for WiFi communication. There are some important features that was not present in HTTP/1.0. If you see HTTP 505 error, it means that your browser tries to connect using HTTP/1.0 protocol, which is not supported by GoodReader.
You can adjust your web-browser settings to use HTTP/1.1 instead of HTTP/1.0. However, instead of doing this, please consider using "Professional" WiFi-transfer technique, where this issue will not be relevant.
GoodReader uses very simple built-in web-browser, it's much simpler than Safari. While Safari is capable of intercepting untrusted certificate notifications, very simple browser used by GoodReader is not capable of such thing. Therefore it is not possible to browse secure web-sites with untrusted certificates with simple GoodReader's browser. Sorry about that.
The navigation menu with a back button has disappeared to give you more reading space. To bring this menu back, quickly tap in the middle of the screen (this applies to every file type).
There's a very special case with PDF files, when tapping in the middle of the screen is not desirable. For example, the middle of the screen can be occupied by a big PDF Link, which will take you to a very different place if you tap it. For cases like this we have provided another way to turn the navigation menu on/off - a quick tap with three fingers anywhere on the screen.
First of all, please hard-reboot your iPhone (with powering off). Sometimes it solves the problem. If it doesn't help, please read the following instructions.
While we use our own PDF viewing engine, we still have to use Apple's PDF parsing and rendering engine, which is a part of iPhone OS. Unfortunately, while most of things become better with each iPhone OS update, some things get broken. Some PDF files that worked absolutely fine on earlier iPhone OS versions, now crash if tried on iPhone OS 3.0. These cases are very rare and we've notified Apple about this bug. Hopefully it will be fixed in one of iPhone OS updates.
However, there's a very simple workaround for this, if you have a Mac computer.
Open this PDF file in Mac's standard Preview application, go to File menu and select Save As command. Then resave this file as a new PDF (just make sure to change a file name, to preserve the original file unchanged). The new PDF file will be formatted in iPhone-friendly way.
There are two main reasons for this:
Consult our customer support service for more details.
The reason is JPEG2000 image compression. This compression used in some PDF files can't be understood by current versions of iPhone OS (and GoodReader heavily relies on its capabilities).
However, there's a very easy workaround for that.
If you have a Mac computer, open this PDF file in Mac's standard Preview application, go to File menu and select Save As command. Then resave this file as a new PDF (just make sure to change a file name, to preserve the original file unchanged). The new PDF file will be formatted in iPhone-friendly way.
If you have a PC computer, the solution would be to reassemble a file in Adobe Acrobat software (or other) replacing JPEG2000 image compression with more conventional JPEG. Print your file to a special Adobe PDF printer (installed by Acrobat). Make sure that inside this printer's settings, on Images tab two first Compression fields don't show JPEG2000. If they do, change them to JPEG.
This unpleasant problem is very well known to us. While we use our own PDF viewing engine, we still have to use Apple's PDF parsing and rendering engine, which is a part of iPhone OS. For some reason this engine doesn't correctly decode some particular fonts, showing a scrambled text, and you can even see that the text itself changes when you change the zoom ratio. Unfortunately, the only thing we can do about it is to file a bug report to Apple, which we already did. Hopefully it will be fixed in one of iPhone OS updates.
You can easily see that this bug is not GoodReader's, but Apple's, by opening the same file in some other PDF viewer application (for example, in native iPhone's Mail application) - you will see the same result there.
iPhone is relatively slow device, compared to a desktop computer. And PDF format is very complex, it allows to format its internal data in a variety of ways. Some of those ways are what we call "iPhone-unfriendly", meaning that they overload iPhone's processor with a lot of unnecessary calculations.
However, there's a very simple workaround for this.
If you have a Mac computer, open this PDF file in Mac's standard Preview application, go to File menu and select Save As command. Then resave this file as a new PDF (just make sure to change a file name, to preserve the original file unchanged). The new PDF file will be formatted in iPhone-friendly way.
If you have a PC computer, then workaround will be a little less simple, and it requires Adobe Acrobat software. Please contact our customer support service for more details about pacthing such files on PC computers.
The reason - fonts are not embedded into a PDF file. iPhone OS has only limited subset of Asian fonts inside of it.
There's a very easy workaround for this. You have to embed all fonts into a PDF file.
If you have a Mac computer, open this PDF file in Mac's standard Preview application, go to File menu and select Save As command. Then resave this file as a new PDF (just make sure to change a file name, to preserve the original file unchanged). The new PDF file will contain all fonts.
If you have a PC computer, the solution would be to reassemble a file in Adobe Acrobat software embedding all fonts into it. Print your file to a special Adobe PDF printer (installed by Acrobat). Make sure that inside this printer's settings, on Fonts tab Embed all fonts checkbox is on.
If you're currently on-the-go and desktop computer is not available, but you need urgent access to a file with missing fonts, use PDF Reflow feature.
You are probably trying to open a PDF Portfolio file.
PDF Portfolios are supported, but not for a direct reading, like it happens in Adobe Acrobat 9 or later. PDF Portfolios are complex PDF files with a very simple first page (usually it says something like "This file can be opened with Adobe Acrobat 9"), and a set of many PDF files embedded into this file, which is used simply as a container for other PDF files. GoodReader lets you extract those files from a PDF Portfolio for further reading them as normal PDF files. Due to a specific technology used for this extraction, every file must be fully loaded into memory before extraction, so very large embedded files will not be extracted.
The most probable reason is that you're seeing a scanned page. Please note that scanned page is not a textual information - it's a picture.
Modern PDF-creating software often includes the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) information when creating PDFs from scanned pages. In such cases PDF Reflow may show you a valid text, but that's not always the case, many scanned PDFs don't have any textual information.
Here are possible reasons for this:
You may see a scanned page, and PDF Reflow may extract textual information provided by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine of PDF creating software. Optical Character Recognition engine sometimes produces strange character sequences when it's uncertain about which character exactly it sees.
Some PDF files with right-to-left fonts instead of encoding text as they should - from right to left - actually contain text stored in left-to-right (i.e. reversed) order. GoodReader extracts text in the order as it appears in PDF file, which makes it look backwards in Reflow mode. We're still working on this issue. Please keep in mind that this problem is created by PDF creating software, which doesn't store text inside PDF in the correct order.
Some PDF files with right-to-left fonts actually contain characters stored in left-to-right (i.e. reversed) order. To be able to find text in such files, the search string must be entered backwards. Use the Flip search string switch in PDF section of Application Settings to enter search string in readable form, and it will be flipped backwards internally during the search.
The file could get damaged during file transfer process. Please check the file size and see if it matches the size of the original file. In any case try to delete a file and reupload it to GoodReader.
If reuploading file doesn't help, we encourage you to send this sample file to our customer support service for further examining.
You can turn Double-tap for zooming option off in PDF section of Applications Settings. This option also controls the single tap with two fingers gesture for zooming out.
In order to read TXT files you have to select the correct Text Encoding first. This can be done in Viewing TXT files section of the Application Settings page, which can be opened with this button:
This was an issue with iPhone OS 2.x. It was resolved in iPhone OS 3.0. Please update your device.
Unlike with PDF and TXT files, for which we wrote our own viewers, we use iPhone's built-in viewing engine for MS Office files. This engine is not able to open large MS Office files.
The solution would be to convert your MS Office files to PDFs. Huge PDF files are not a problem for GoodReader.
Unlike with PDF and TXT files, for which we wrote our own viewers, we use iPhone's built-in viewing engine for MS Office files. This engine sometimes shows MS Office files incorrectly.
The best solution would be to convert your MS Office files to PDFs. In this case you will solve the incorrect appearance problem, plus you'll get the ability to use our Find Text in PDF files feature and other PDF-specific features.
iWork'08/09 files must be saved with Include Preview option.
iWork'09 files require iPhone OS 3.0 or later.
The Reopen last file switch is mirrored in main iPhone's Settings (look for GoodReader settings there). Turn it off and restart GoodReader - this time it will not try to reopen the problematic file.
It happens because opening such folder takes a lot of time, and iPhone OS kills the app if it fails to start within a reasonable timeframe.
To break this deadlock you can force GoodReader to start from the root folder, where there are no files at all. To do this, use the Start from the root option in main iPhone's Settings (look for GoodReader settings there).
Our extremely friendly and experienced customer support service will be happy to answer all your questions and to solve all kinds of problems that you might experience when using our software. We reply to most e-mails within hours upon receiving. Please double-check that your e-mail address is correct, and make sure that your spam-filters wouldn't block mail from goodreader.net and goodiware.com