Here are some simple steps to getting your PDF files on your iPhone, in a very readable format. You will need:

• An iPhone
• A PDF
• Adobe Acrobat Pro (or the free trial)
• Optional: A text editor with good ‘find and replace’ (I used Dreamweaver)
• Somewhere to host your file (upload it somewhere)
• Instapaper (preferably the Pro version, as it saves your position!)

Step 1:

Open the PDF file in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Step 2:

Save the PDF as an HTML file. Use HTML 3 rather than “HTML 4.01 with CSS 1.0” — this is because we just want the text and do not care much about the formatting. Acrobat’s pathetic excuse for CSS will place unwanted <span> tags around every few words.

Step 3: Optional

This step is optional, but helps reduce the file size and clear out the clutter. Only do this if you know what you are doing.

Open the resulting file in your text editor of choice. You will see it is littered with <FONT> tags and unwated attributes like align="center". If you have good ‘find and replace’ skills then simply get rid of all of these. It helps if your application has regular expression support.

Step 4:

Upload the file to your hosting. It really does not matter where this goes, so long as it remains there for a few minutes. If you do not have your own web hosting, then get creative.

Step 5:

Use your Instapaper bookmarklet or just add the page manually from the Instapaper site. Then just launch the iPhone app, it will download, and presto! A beautiful way to read your PDFs on the go.

Please note that Instapaper was not designed to handle very large files (at least I don’t think so), so you best not do this with The Lord of the Rings but try it and see how it goes, YMMV.