Dear Fantasy Flight Games.
I've just bought your latest two PDF releases Rites of Battle for Deathwatch and Battlefleet Koronus for Rogue Trader and have been reading them on my iPad.

The Rites of Battle is perfect. It opens up smoothly everything displays properly and it looks gorgeous. This is how your PDFs should be done.

The Battlefleet Koronus PDF however, is not so good. Once again, the sidebar backgrounds (reddish with white text) are disappearing, leaving the sidebars unreadable.

As a dedicated customer, I was wondering why you couldn't produce the Deathwatch Corebook and Battlefleet Koronus to the same standards as Rites of Battle.

Yours with sincerest regards,
TesteTest
Peace, Love and Numbats.

I bought 'The Emperor Protects' as a PDF and am having the same issue. I'm not sure it's a FFG issue though, more an iPad rendering issue. I think the iPad (1 and 2) has issues with layers in some PDF files. I love to hear if anyone has solved this issue....I've tried lots of different PDF readers on the iPad, I've tried 'flattening' the PDF files on my PC but to no avail.

As a workaround, if you use Goodreader you can select the 'unreadable' text, copy it and paste it into a note. Not ideal but at least you can read it.

And if FFG did whatever they did to Rites of Battle to make it fully readable with their older PDF's then that would be good to! Surely some of their testers have iPads?

Shieldstromme said:

In Good Reader you can also just convert it to text for ease of reading. I also believe it's an issue of the software. Have you tried on a desktop-computer yet?

Unfortunately PDF reading on the iPad has a few known issues:

1. JPEG2000 compression. This is unsupported.

2. PDF layers. Not all layers, just some. I don't know the exacts, but the background boxes that FFG use for their sidebars don't render right.

So, to make the files you have paid for work on your iPad, you have to do a little work:

1. Download PrimoPDF (free, Windows) and install it.

2. Open the FFG PDF file, then Print it to the PrimoPDF "printer".

3. When the PrimoPDF screen comes up (can be pretty slow) click on Options and make sure it is set for PDF Version 1.3 or 1.4. And make sure to use the "Screen" tab along the top. Then click Create PDF. This will re-create the PDF file in the backward compatible PDF Version.

4. Transfer the new PDF to your iPad (I'd suggest using Dropbox + GoodReader personally).

The only issue is the backwards compatible conversion will sometimes cause images to have odd white lines in them, not a huge deal, just annoying.

Sadly, all PDF Viewers for the iPad use the same PDF engine that is built into IOS, which is a bit crippled for whatever reason. I've only ever ran in to issues with FFG's PDF's on mine though, so not sure what is being done differently.

Hope that works for you.

I know that other graphics/layer heavy PDFs (like the Pathfinder ones from Paizo) also have similar issues. The problem is definitely with the ipad's renderer not complying to the full PDF standard.