geek.phatus.com » iPhone http://geek.phatus.com Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:25:42 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc en hourly 1 View PDF files on the iPhone without installing a reader http://geek.phatus.com/2010/01/view-pdf-files-on-the-iphone-without-downloading-a-reader/ http://geek.phatus.com/2010/01/view-pdf-files-on-the-iphone-without-downloading-a-reader/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 06:31:00 +0000 Pyro222 http://geek.phatus.com/?p=1145 Recently, I’ve built the necessity to read and study more text on the go. Until I can afford a kindle or perhaps a decent laptop, I thought I might give the iPhone a shot as a viable e-book reader. Sounded simple enough so I transfered my documents over to my phone only to quickly realize, I had no pdf viewer. Or so I thought. Now I’m not much for the app store and I couldn’t seem to find a decent free app in the trusted repositories from cydia so I did some research and found that safari can actually read pdf documents. However, the problem with this method was that everyone seemed to suggest that one should email the document to themselves and open it from the web with safari. Quite inefficient and will only work if you have some form of Internet access. If you currently have a jailbroken iPhone, There is a much simpler way to access your pdf files in safari and should work with or without Internet access. Read on for a simple solution.

The rundown

In searching for a solution, I realized I could simply serve the files to myself through http. There are a server packages in the repositories however I remembered recently coming across a killer one line command from commandlinefu.com that serves up the current working directory on port 8000 using python.
In order to proceed you will need to have a jailbroken iPhone with python installed on it.

Step-By-Step

  1. To serve the files you will have to have first uploaded your pdf documents somewhere on your iphone.
  2. Next either open up your terminal app on the phone or ssh to it and cd to the parent directory containing the documents.
  3. Now simply type in “python -m SimpleHTTPServer” to begin serving the current directory on port 8000. I believe you may also specify a port number at the end of the command. (you may need to be root to do this)
  4. Now open up safari and in the address bar type in “localhost:8000″ and you will now see a directory listing of your documents folder in which you can now browse and open as you wish.

  5. Don’t forget when you are finished to return to your terminal or ssh session and terminate the process.

Sources

CommandlineFU.com

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