Quick iPhone Trick — Easy Access To PDFs
A quick hack that I didn’t see elsewhere but is too easy and fast not to mention — currently, there isn’t a great method of storing files on the iPhone. I keep a bunch of papers around in PDF format that I like having available whenever I’m standing in line or whatnot. You can potentially mail it to yourself, but then you have network access to read it, and it takes a while to bring it up.
With a Jailbroken phone you can do much cooler stuff:
- Install the Safari patch that allows for local file access via file://
- Use scp to copy your files into an appropriate directory
scp myfile.pdf root@iphone:/var/root/Media/ebooks
- Create a stub index.html file in the same directory and add links to your various files.
You may need to use the viewport meta tag in order to make your HTML file readable.
<html> <body> <meta name="viewport" content="width=display-width"> <ul> <li><a href="file1.pdf">File 1</a></li> <li><a href="file2.pdf">File 2</a></li> </ul> </body> </html>
- Open up the stub .HTML file in Safari and save the bookmark
file:///var/root/Media/ebooks/index.html
Voila! Instant access to all your PDFs and other files, with no network access required.