I have a Surface Pro 7, and when I bought it, I intended to use it for reading A4 sized PDF books. Now I find that I almost never do so, because of low app usability.
The features I am looking for in the software app are the ones typically found in good epub reading apps for Android.
- (Knockout) Full screen view, with turn-one-page-at-a-time mode, with the option to switch to continuous mode.
- (Knockout) Support for all typical kinds of PDF meant for book reading - typeset ones, scanned ones, scanned-with-ocr-overlayed ones. No need for support of archival features, signatures, 3D objects, XFA or other not-reading-related bells and whistles.
- (Very important) Page turning by a tap in the lower right corner of the screen. Not a sweep, and not in any other location - for one-handed use, I have to be able to do a simple tap where my right thumb is.
- (Very important) No other actions (such as selection of text or pictures) being mapped to a gesture very similar to the page-turning tap.
- (Important) If I change to continuous-mode instead of single-page, the paging tap should be mapped to go down one screen, not to jump to the next document page. If I have zoomed in and scrolled horizontally in continuous mode, then the paging tap should remember the horizontally scrolled position, and not jump to the lefthand edge of the page.
- (Important) Bookmarks. I don't have to write an annotation, but I want to place a marker here and there throughout the book. And in a non-reading mode, I want to be able to see a list of all bookmarks at once, so I can navigate between them.
- (Important) Touch-based controls. For example, if the document has a rotated page inserted (usually some kind of table in a tiny font), I want to be able to rotate it to fill the screen and physically turn the tablet in my hand - without attaching a keyboard.
- (Nice to have) On opening a file, it will already start in the correctly rotated full-screen reading mode, in the last place where it was closed.
- (Very important) The app is not connected to any kind of web service which tracks what I read, or synchronizes my files to an app-provider-controlledcloud.
- (Nice to have) Easily control the light intensity, such as the drag-finger-along-left-edge like on Moon+ for Android.
I don't need some other common reader features such as text reflow, control over the document appearance, dictionary, or sync between devices.
So far, I have tried Adobe Reader and Sumatra PDF, but both are very obviously not meant for tablet reading, and so they behave super clunky and I spend more time operating the app than reading.
I am OK with an app which doesn't bring this all out of the box, if there is a way to change the settings to behave as described, and to remember the changed settings permanently.
