The iPhone has had built in PDF support since the day it shipped. It is the de facto way of presenting and sharing digital documents. You can open them via email, view them in Safari, and even gain access to them via third party apps like Air Sharing and QuickOffice. However, viewing support has been limited as such, as you can’t really do much else other than zoom in and pan around.

I didn’t think much of PDF Expert [iTunes] when I first heard about it, but after using it for a few days I can tell you it’s a really robust tool. Let me tell you all about it.

Getting your documents in there

There’s two ways to get documents into PDF Expert. The more familiar way is to mount it on your Mac as a Wifi hard drive. There’s no setup required as you just have to enter the IP address and you’re good to go. The other way, is to use the free 500MB/128 documents storage provided in a Readdle account. You can upload files into that yourself, or even have people email you PDF documents via a unique email address. You files are then immediately accessible by the iPhone app. You can also upload (and read) Office, iWork, RTF, HTML, and other files to your readdle account.

Reading PDFs on the go

While reading PDFs using the default viewers is fun, PDF Expert adds that bit of power required to truly navigate PDFs. To start with, PDF Expert can easily handle large PDF files. It’s got a unique way of rendering pages, which sort of fade in as you scroll. I could easily read a 35MB document with large images and heavy set text. Landscape mode pulls out all the toolbars leaving you with the full screen to read.

You have access to the chapter structure of the PDF, including drilling down deeper into sub-chapters. You can also save your own bookmarks on device (no saving). You can also jump to any page in the document you want. There’s a built in search tool to find sections by keyword, which is pretty handy. Lastly, and I didn’t test this, it has the ability to open password protected PDF files, which I don’t think the iPhone’s default viewer can.

Sharing

Another interesting bit, is the ability to copy-paste text from a PDF document, which is otherwise not available systemwide. It’s not entirely perfect, since PDF text doesn’t run like a regular document, but you can effectively pull out blocks of text for pasting somewhere. PDF Expert also has an in app Mail sheet, which allows you to email a document you have in your storage.

Bring out those reading glasses

I know this “review” sounds more like a press release, but it’s hard to find fault in something that has a lot of thought put in it. For features missing, I’d say No.1 is iDisk support. I honestly don’t know why this is, since Readdle was the first company to publish an iDisk app for the iPhone. Second, is the ability to add notes to a PDF and save it. Also, as an app, it’s not so much a fun tool you would use for reading, as much as a professional tool you would use for reviewing documents and reports. I mean, the UI isn’t candied up, nor does it have any fancy display of documents in the main view. At $4.99, PDF Expert [iTunes] is the perfect tool for the mobile professional.