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How to reflow a PDF on Android
Android shows a PDF as a shrunken printed page, so a two-column paper means pinch, zoom, drag, repeat. Reflowed, the text fits your screen in one column and you just scroll. Here's how.
Four steps
- Install PDFreflow from Google Play. It's free to try.
- Open your PDF, whichever way is handiest:
- tap Import in the app,
- tap the PDF in Files or Downloads and pick PDFreflow under Open with,
- or share it to PDFreflow from mail, browser or chat.
- Read. It opens already reflowed. Scroll down; nothing to zoom.
- Make it yours. Font, text size, margins, colours and dark mode live in Settings.
The PDF
In PDFreflow · light / dark
Page 1 of the BERT paper (Devlin et al., 2019). Left: the PDF as printed. Right: the same page in PDFreflow, in light and dark mode.
What to expect
- Made for hard layouts: two-column papers, textbooks, manuals. Formulas and figures stay in the text as pictures, and citations stay tappable.
- Long books too: it prepares the pages where you're reading first, not the whole book.
- Not only PDF: EPUB, TXT and HTML work too.
- No scans: a scanned PDF is a photo of a page, with no text to reflow.
- Private: no account, and your files never leave your phone.
It's not perfect on every layout yet. If a page reads wrong, long-press the text and send feedback from the app. I read every report.
What it costs
The first 30 pages of every document are free. During the open beta, one tap unlocks the rest of a book, also free.