{"id":5247,"date":"2009-09-30T14:00:54","date_gmt":"2009-09-30T21:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=5247"},"modified":"2009-10-19T17:31:22","modified_gmt":"2009-10-20T00:31:22","slug":"read-pdfs-on-your-phone-with-opera-mini-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/5247\/","title":{"rendered":"Updated: Read PDF’s On Your Phone With Opera Mini 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

Updated 19-Oct-2009<\/strong> -Added pdfdownload.org and Serola’s mobile PDF conversion form.<\/p>\n

After Adobe Flash, I think the second biggest mobile browsing annoyance is\u00a0 the PDF file format, which most mobile browsers can’t display.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Opera Mini and the ingenuity of the mobile user community it is now possible to view PDFs on most phones.\u00a0 The process is a bit tedious but if you really need to read a particular PDF on your phone it works.<\/p>\n

The idea is to grab the URL of the PDF document and pass it to Adobe’s online PDF to text converter at adobe.com\/products\/acrobat\/access_onlinetools.html<\/a>. The\u00a0 Adobe converter isn’t very mobile friendly. Its big page size requires a lot of scrolling with a mobile browser plus you have to fill out an intrusive online form every time that basically asks you to justify why you need to use the tool. Fortunately Windows Mobile guru “Menneisyys<\/a>” has created a simple mobile front end to the Adobe converter at menneisyys.s156.eatj.com\/pdf.html<\/a> that only requires you to enter the URL.<\/p>\n

So how do you get the URL to paste into Menneisyys’ form?\u00a0 A new feature in Opera Mini 5 lets you select and copy text from any web page. If the PDF’s URL is displayed on the page you can just copy it and paste it into the converter in another tab.\u00a0 But many pages link to PDFs without showing the actual URL which is a problem as Opera Mini, unlike UCWEB,\u00a0 has no “Copy Link Location” feature.<\/p>\n

Lucky for us, Finnish\u00a0University of Tampere researcher and WapReview reader Serola<\/a> found a bookmarklet that replaces links in web pages with their URLs. He tweaked it a little to get it working in Opera Mini.\u00a0 I’ve added the bookmarklet to my Opera Mini Bookmarklets page for your convenience.<\/p>\n

\"View<\/p>\n

Here’s how to use Serola’s bookmarklet to\u00a0 view PDFs in Opera Mini 5.<\/p>\n