We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the latest update for Reader on Android today. The iOS update would be available very soon, pending iTunes processing. We’ve got a lot of great new functionality in this update that we’ve added based on feedback from you, our users.
Update 3/9/2013:The iOS update is now live and available on the iTunes Store.
General Usability
Go To Page One of the consistent requests we’ve had is to allow users to go directly to any page in the document. We’ve found a way to enable this in a really intuitive way, so we’ve added it now! Just tap on the page number, and you’ll be able to enter the new page you want to display.
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- The Go To Page option allows you to navigate directly to a specific page in the document
Night Mode This is a multi-faceted feature. It is helpful for night-time reading, to generate less light pollution, it can extend your battery while reading by having your display use less electricity, it can help reduce eye strain, and it’s even good for people with some vision issues! Switch this on in the View Modes menu.
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- Night Mode: Off
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- Night Mode: On
Smart Zoom Double-tap on a column of text, and Reader will zoom straight to that column making maximum use of your screen.
Screen Brightness Lock If you’ve ever been reading something and had your screen switch to the lock screen or dim when you’re in the middle of a sentence, you’ll appreciate this. When Reader is in the foreground, we’ll keep the screen active for an extended time so you can keep reading. It will still time out eventually, but not so quickly that you need to keep tapping your device to continue reading.
Undo in Freehand Annotation Drawing a freehand Annotation is natural on a touch-screen device, but until now making a mistake has meant canceling and starting over. Now we have an Undo and Redo so you can just fix your mistakes easily!
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- Before Undo
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- After Undo
Performance We are always looking into improving performance, and have been able to make enhancements on both iOS and Android that should make Reader more pleasant to use.
Bug Fixes We’ve been able to make bug fixes in Forms entry, as well as fixed some stability issues in this update. We’re always monitoring the forums, blog, and reviews to learn about the issues you’re encountering, and fix issues as we learn of them, so please keep communicating any problems you encounter!
Sync Last Position on Acrobat.com
We’ve added a great update recently to our Acrobat.com file sync that you might not have noticed. Now when you read a document that is stored in Acrobat.com, we save the page you’re on in the cloud so that whenever you go to read that same document in Reader on another device, it not only makes sure that the file is the same version, but it automatically brings you to the same place you were. For users working in a multi-device world, this is a great help.
FormsCentral PDF Validation
We’re regularly adding enhancements to keep pace with FormsCentral, as well, so we’ve updated Reader to support the FormsCentral Client-Side form validation. For more information on FormsCentral, and how it can help you with creating and distributing forms, and collecting the data, read here.
Android Specific Enhancements
Google Cloud Print With Google Cloud Print integration, Adobe Reader for Android catches up to Reader for iOS, and allows you to print your PDF documents from your Android device. You’ll need to get a Google Cloud Print account and set up your printer to take advantage of this.
“Back” after clicking an internal link or bookmark For anybody who has read a long reference document with internal links, this will be a welcome addition. After you tap on an internal link, we’ll show a “back” arrow icon next to the page number display. If you tap that, you’ll go back to the location you were on when tapping the link or bookmark. This is a feature that we only have on Android because we just ran out of time. It’ll be on iOS in our next major update in another quarter!
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- The back button takes you back to the place in the document you came from using bookmarks, links or the scrubber
iOS Specific Enhancements
VoiceOver support for Accessibility We’re really happy to say that Adobe Reader for iOS is now accessible. Low vision and blind users can now navigate through the app using the VoiceOver gestures, and Reader will read the page content out as well. There is certainly some more work that we can still do to improve this, but our Accessibility experts said that this was good enough to release, and is a major improvement over not being accessible. We are looking into bringing Accessibility out on Android during 2013 as well, but we don’t have a date for that yet.
Keyboard Support for Form-field navigation iOS users can now use the ‘Tab’ & ‘Shift+Tab’ buttons on bluetooth keyboards when filling PDF forms to navigate between fields. This improves form filling speed and efficiency.
Dennis Griffin
Principal Product Manager
Adobe Reader for Tablets and Smartphones
Comments
Updated to 10.5.0 early this morning, Night view enhancement works well. Nice touch!
But we’re still having serious issues with fill-in forms.
Here’s our list of issues;
• App hangs for several seconds after a “Reset Field”
• App sometimes hangs for several seconds when advancing to next or pervious field
• Very difficult or maybe I should say next to impossible to enter in to “select, select all, cut, copy” mode
while in a text field
• Cursor and text disappears from view while attempting to switch to “select, select all, cut, copy” txt mode.
• If you touch the back / delete button on the keypad while attempting to switch to select text mode the entire
field’s width is reduced to a single character wide and all previously entered text is left aligned in a
single character vertical column. Advance to the next or previous field restores the field to the correct
field width
Issues specific to Combo Box fields;
• Drop down list activates as soon user moves to that field. Very annoying because it blocks the users view of the field and forces the user to the drop down list in order to touch or see the field
• Custom entered text in cmb fields is destroyed and replaced with default or previous field value.
Thanks Dale,
We’ll take a look at the issues you reported here, and follow up if we need samples that demonstrate!
Dennis
Thanks Dennis
I use adobe reading constantly for school to read my textbooks on my tablet in PDF form. The chapters are locked for students only and i have to put in a username and password to access them but the app will not let me enter my information in or even let me select the field to put it in so not able to fill in form data at all. I use a double power tablet with full aosp rk29sdk if it helps. I don’t want to use another reader app and school starts in a week so hopefully this is fixed soon. Thank you for your hard work.
These improvements are great. I will be using Night Mode a lot. The accessibility improvements are no doubt welcome. I would like to see text Reflow as well as it is particularly important for mobile devices.
Regarding FormsCentral validations, does this refer to the custom JavaScript validations that are included with a FormsCentral distributed PDF? If so, are the same JavaScript properties/methods available to other forms as well? If so, it would be great if the documentation could be updated so developers know exactly what’s supported.
I have been using adobe reader on my tablet android based ICS 4.0 to prepare for my exams, highlights and underlines i used often, but now i have lost all the highlights and underlines, i am in complete lost as i had marked sections important for study. How do i get them back, is it because of the update?
Could you describe the steps you followed that resulted in your losing the changes? Please send your response at adobereader-android@adobe.com. The update should have had nothing to do with it, but we would like to get more details to try and understand what might be happening. Thanks for reporting.
I am looking into using Reader Mobile (on Android) to open a PDF, fill out the form, and input a signature(scribble) using a stylus. Ideally, once signed the document would lock specific form fields.
So far I’ve learned that:
1) Ink Signatures is what I want for the scribble effect. However, they are no true digital signatures and can not lock a form.
2) Though making form elements read-only through JavaScript might work on Adobe Reader for desktops, I have been unable to get JavaScript (an app.alert anyway) working in PDFs on Reader Mobile, even though http://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/Mobile/Enterprise_Guide_ReaderMobile.pdf seems to tell me it should work (partially).
Is there another angle I’m not looking at? For example, can Reader Mobile sign pdfs using a digital signature embedded in the device? Using EchoSign and the likes requires an Internet connection, which is something my implementation could do without.
Reader Mobile does not have support for applying cryptographic Digital Signatures to a document yet, and I’m not sure when we’ll be able to provide it.
google is screwing adobe and customers like me… NOTE the IRONY of the e-mail adress
try as I like, google will not send me the app… they will not recognize my existing account… it appears that they are trying to force me to BUY something from them before I can get your free app
PLEASE make the ‘reader for android’ app available for down-load on your site
If you’d like to download Reader directly from Adobe.com, you can go here and choose Android:
http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/
The language choice doesn’t matter…all 17 languages are included in the APK. You may be prompted to allow installing apps from untrusted sources (ie not from an app store).
I’m not sure what the error you are seeing in Google Play is, but I have seen that users periodically have issues connecting.
Dennis
Is there a way to restrict iPad users from saving a copy of a PDF in adobe reader to a different workstation than the one it was loaded from? I want to hand a user a file to go and read but need to ensure they don’t put that sensitive file on any other machines. Oh, and all wireless capability will be removed from the iPad.
We don’t have any way to control whether a user is allowed to re-share a document that is on their device. And even if we did, they could just plug the iPad into a computer and download the file that way.
Okay, thanks for the quick reply!
Adobe Reader for mobile DESPERATELY needs to have the comments on highlights back. It feels very naked without them, and I’m almost inclined to use my netbook instead of the Android reader because the netbook can still read the commented highlights. I am forever lamenting that this feature was left out of the mobile version. As it is, either my commented works are jammed with little comment icons that may or may not fit in the allotted space, or I simply cannot read the comments included in the PDF on a mobile platform.
Another thing to point out is that the comment boxes have really tiny font and there is no way to resize it. One of the common reasons I hear for people buying a tablet is so they can zoom in on what they’re reading (those with poor eyesight), and having comments that cannot be enlarged removes that advantage.
Thanks for your suggestions. We’re currently working to add the ability to view notes attached to text highlights, and we’ll think about how to let users change the font size or zoom in on the notes, as well.
Dennis Griffin
Hoffe das ich die Spiele auf FB spielen kann.
Adobe Reader is for viewing PDF documents, not for Facebook games. The Adobe Flash Player is no longer supported on Android devices.
After the update my BlackBerry Adobe Reader App does not work anymore. The symbol is gone, too. I can’t work with my BlackBerry Z10 like this. Please fix this asap!
This is a known issue, that Blackberry is working on. Here is a link to a Knowledge Base article from Blackberry that should help you solve the problem:
http://btsc.webapps.blackberry.com/btsc/viewdocument.do?externalId=KB34105&sliceId=2&cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&noCount=true&ViewedDocsListHelper=com.kanisa.apps.common.BaseViewedDocsListHelperImpl
Maybe I’m missing something but, I can seem to maintain the embedded search index or custom page numbering done in Acrobat Pro, when the files moves to Reader mobile. Is there a way to hold these settings coming across?
Thanks,
Brian
Hello Brian,
Unfortunately, the mobile versions of Adobe Reader do not currently support custom page numbering or search index. If we get enough requests for this, we will consider adding support in the future, and I’m putting your request in our backlog for consideration.
Thanks Dennis. That is disappointing that those functions are not available yet. We are posting PDF books for field workers and the book works wonderfully to search for say a specific point number while on the desktop, but the search on the field app is slow without that index.
Thanks for the consideration!