Using large PDFs with Air Sharing (via a Mac)

I'm a long-time Apple sysadmin and technician.

One of the things I have to use a lot are the (not-available-to-the-general-public) Apple hardware service manuals for repairing the various Macs I receive. These are PDF files that range from as small as 14MB to as large as 60MB and more, with hundreds of pages.

My iPod Touch just can't directly handle the size of that file. It's PDF viewer will likely choke on it, especially since the files contain fairly high-res photos of the systems.

So, I had an idea. Convert the PDF into more digestible pictures...JPEG files, then transfer them to the iPod with Air Sharing. Doing this should be a good workaround for those that need to read large files of this type.

The first thing you need to do is convert each PDF page into a JPEG picture. That's cool. You have a tool to do it in Mac OS X Leopard: Automator.

(Needless to say, this isn't a tutorial on using this powerful tool, but the steps here should get you by.)

1. Launch Automator.
2. From the Files and Folders actions on the left side of the Automator window, drag the item "Ask for Finder items" to the right side of the Automator window. Each item you drag there will run that specific action, starting with the top-most item.
3. From the PDF actions, drag the item "Render PDF Pages as Images" to the right side of the Automator window. In this action, there are settings you can change. You should reduce the DPI to as low as possible (150 or less) and use the best compression you can to avoid creating large image files.
4. From the Files and Folders actions on the left side of the Automator window, drag the item "Rename Finder items" to the right side of the Automator window. Change the pop-up to "Make Sequential." Set the Add Number setting to whatever suits you. If you've got a lot of files, you might select the "new nane" button and enter "Page" in the field next to it. Change whether the number will appear in the file before or after, what separators there are, the starting number, and the digit width. For me, my files are hundreds of pages, and using only a single digit will make them list weirdly in the Finder. So I set the digit length to three so that trailing zeroes keep the page order as it should be.
5. Last, from the Files and Folders actions on the left side of the Automator window, drag the item "New Folder" to the right side of the Automator window. You can give a generic name here, then rename the folder yourself in the Finder.
6. Click the File menu and choose Save. Then, test out your Automator script by pressing the Run button at the upper right of the Automator window.

The first thing you'll see is a file dialog. That's what's supposed to happen: Automator is asking "What file do you want to convert?" Choose the PDF file, and click OK. From here, the process takes a while, depending on the number of pages and the size of the pages you are converting. To watch the progress of each script, click on the View menu and choose Log. Once it's all done, a folder will appear where you've told the script to create it (the default location was "Desktop" for me).

If you liked the script, you can save it as an application in Mac OS X that you can open later without Automator. Just choose File->Save As, then save the file as an Application using the pop-up menu in the Save dialog.

To use your converted JPEGs with Air Sharing, you can rename the new folder to match your subject, connect to your iPhone/iTouch with Connect to Server, and then drag them to the Air Sharing Finder window to where you want it to be.

BUT--copying numerous and/or large files to your handheld is not a good idea on slow networks. I learned the hard way as the Finder stalled when the connection was too weak. I couldn't copy a 361-item file folder all at once, and I had to restart the Mac because the Finder was pooched and wouldn't reset.

So, here's the workaround for that.

1. Use Avatron's guide to create an ad-hoc network (see the FAQ in this forum).
2. Open the Settings app on your iPhone/iTouch and select the ad-hoc network you made from your Mac.
3. Open Air Sharing on your handheld.
4. Open your connection to your handheld from your Mac. (Here is where using Bonjour has its benefits. If you use a Bonjour name, you don't have to find out what the ad-hoc IP address is, and if you use your normal network again, you won't have to change the IP, only adjust the network settings on each device.)

Now you can take full advantage of the AirPort network connection, which moves at about .5MB/sec in my tests. Snappy. I've not lost a file or hung the Mac with ad-hoc mode.

Hopefully that's useful for those of you that must carry that large PDF with you. For me, it beats lugging my MacBook around or printing a large manual.

Windows and Linux users may have to go the manual way to convert the PDFs, but hey, you get what you pay for, sadly.

Spencerian posted this Most Excellent tip back in September, when Air Sharing was only ten days old.

Great tip, Spencerian!

Now, you generally will not have to do this with Air Sharing Pro because it uses a custom PDF viewer rather than the iPhone's standard PDF viewer, and can handle large embedded images much more handily. And the new viewer will make it into Air Sharing too, as soon as we integrate the Pro changes into the classic code base. But even Pro has its limits with very high-resolution images, like 1200-dpi full-page scans, so it is likely that this tip will always be useful.

Dave Howell
Avatron Software, Inc.