Request: setting up crop when reading PDFs in iPad version of DTTG

DTTG works very nicely for reading e-books and papers on iPad and making annotations. Thanks for putting a lot of effort into making it!

It would be even better if it had a configurable crop feature, because:

  • iPad screen size is just a tiny bit too small for reading A4 documents comfortably
  • Books and papers usually have large padding / margin (not sure which is a correct word) on the sides and at the top/bottom
  • Sometimes also having a part of book content (e.g. page number at the very bottom, or a chapter name at the very top) displayed all the time is not necessary for reading.

I really like DT syncing the “last seen page” location of PDF documents, and I believe having a crop feature would make it even better as a PDF reader.

I’ve looked at how this feature is often implemented in other PDF readers, and think that any of following (or both options) would be a good addition:

  • Allow user to set up crop borders for odd and even pages separately
  • Allow automatically cropping display to page content. In a way this is similar to “View->Zoom to Width” in DT, except that we need to zoom to the content height or width, whichever hits the display edges first.

Can we please have a feature like this in one of the future releases? Thanks!

The request is noted but this would have to implemented by the developer of the PDF framework we use.

Thank you for your reply. In the meantime DTTG was updated to v3, and this feature hasn’t been added.

I’m now considering using DTTG as a storage/sync solution, while using another app for reading and making highlights/annotations/comments. Would you (or other forum visitors) be able to recommend a PDF reader that

  • Has this kind of auto- or manual crop feature
  • Integrates well with DTTG and transfers highlights / annotations / comments made in the reader into DTTG.

I’ve checked a few free options, and so far haven’t found a reader that has both features. I’ll continue searching, but I thought it would be worth asking collective mind here. Thanks!

That is correct. As I said, development of the PDF framework is under the control of the thrd-party developer, not us. We can only suggest and report things to them but have no control over what they do (or don’t) do.

And sorry, but I don’t have any suggestions for such an application. Perhaps others here may.

Perhaps I misunderstand what @sir.gollum tries to achieve, but if I set the DTTG settings for PDF to vertical, continuous and single page viewing and subsequently open a PDF to read, I can select fullscreen mode with the arrows and double tap the screen to zoom in and crop the layout to the width of the PDF.

(And even managed to compress that description into one sentence!)

Thanks for the suggestion. That is how I was using it, except continuous scrolling mode. I haven’t found the arrows to make it full screen mode, but a single tap on the PDF content is hiding most of the UI. Double tap indeed zooms into the content, but this zooming doesn’t always take the content into account, and also the zooming is not retained when you scroll to the next page.

For posterity, I looked at several free apps yesterday, and two (Xodo Reader and Foxit PDF Editor) seem to support the cropping feature I wanted while also being compatible with DTTG in terms of exporting back highlights / annotations.
I also left a feature request to pspdfkit (the library which DTTG seems to be using).