GoodReader supports viewing of very large plain text (.TXT) files. You have to make sure that your file has .TXT extension, otherwise it may be opened by iPhone's built-in viewing engine, which doesn't have many of the features that our own viewing engine has.
Tips for reading and scrolling
When you open any file, you can see a navigation menu and a button bar, which you can use to close a file and to select actions with buttons.
This navigation menu and button bar soon will disappear to give you more viewing space.
To bring the menu and the buttons back you have to quickly tap in the middle of the screen (this applies to every file type).
You have 2 options to rotate the screen - automatically or manually. Choose your option in General Settings section of Application Settings. In automatic mode screen orientation will follow the actual device movements. In manual mode (very useful for reading in bed) you can always rotate the screen manually with the dedicated button at the right bottom corner of the screen on a button bar.
Before plain text files could be shown correctly, you have to select the correct Text Encoding first.
Use dragging or taps to scroll the text. Read our Tips for reading and scrolling.
Print your files on AirPrint-enabled printers (iOS 4.2 or later, works only on iOS devices with multitasking)
Use Autoscroll feature to read text without ever touching the screen.
Use Find Text feature to search for text.
Edit text files.
Use Bookmarks feature to add named bookmarks to your text.
Use Day / Night Mode switch to quickly change text and background colors for comfortable night reading.
Adjust colors in TXT section of Application Settings.
Before plain text files could be shown correctly, you have to select the correct Text Encoding first. It can be done in Viewing TXT files section of the Application Settings page, which can be opened with this button:
If you change the text encoding in settings while no TXT file is opened, this encoding will be a default one, and will apply to all newly added TXT files. If you change the encoding in settings while some TXT file is opened, this will only change the encoding for this particular file.
Consult our customer support service if you're having trouble determining the correct text encoding for your files.
Historical Note. When computers only started to develop and disk space was very valuable, text files were encoded using only one byte per character, giving only 256 unique character codes. However, different national alphabets for different languages contain much more characters than that. So people started to develop different Text Encodings, which are mappings of 256 possible byte codes to particular characters in a particular alphabet. Plus different platforms (Mac, DOS, Windows) used different mapping schemes. It all resulted in a huge variety of text encodings (like MacRoman, DOSLatin1, WindowsGreek, WindowsCyrillic and many many others). Later Unicode standard appeared. Unicode uses two bytes per single character, giving a universal scheme that includes most of characters of most of world's languages. And to make things even more fun, Unicode has different schemes for storing characters in a physical file (UTF8, UTF16BE, UTF16LE, etc.). So if you open your TXT-file and see unrecognizable characters, you should probably choose the correct Text Encoding.
![]() | Day / Night mode switch. Quickly changes text and background colors for comfortable night reading. Adjust colors in Viewing TXT files section of the Application Settings. | |
![]() | Opens Application Settings page. For your convenience Viewing TXT files section is opened instantly, but you may go one level up and access all settings, if you wish. | |
![]() | Starts variable speed Autoscrolling to read text without ever touching the screen. | |
![]() | Opens up Text Editing window. | |
![]() | Opens up a choice of actions: | |
![]() | Offers a choice of actions for a currently opened file - Open In..., E-Mail and Print. | |
![]() | You have 2 options to rotate the screen - automatically or manually. Choose your option in General Settings section of Application Settings. In automatic mode screen orientation will follow the actual device movements. In manual mode (very useful for reading in bed) you can always rotate the screen manually with this button. |
Use this button to edit small and medium TXT files. Standard iPhone's editing control is used, with its size limitation. Try to avoid editing TXT files of more than several hundreds kilobytes in size.
Variable speed Autoscroll feature lets you read text without ever touching the screen.
Use this button to start autoscrolling:
To stop autoscrolling quickly tap in the middle of the screen to show navigation menu and press this button:
You can adjust the autoscrolling speed either in Viewing TXT files section of the Application Settings or by using the slider at the right border of the screen (only visible when navigation menu is on, quickly tap in the middle of the screen to show/hide navigation menu).
If you missed something in the autoscrolled text, just drag the text back, hold it while reading, and release it. Autoscrolling will continue after releasing the text.
Use this button to activate the Find Text feature and to enter a string to search, or to select one of 20 previously searched strings. The search operation is performed starting from your current viewing position in TXT file. The found string is highlighted in inverse colors.
This button bar pops up when something was found with the Find feature. The buttons are: Find Previous (backward search), Find Next and Clear Find Results. The first two buttons perform a search starting from the highlighted position in respective direction. The third button removes highlight from the found text and hides this button bar. You don't need to clear find results to perform a new search using the main Find feature. The new highlighted search result will automatically replace the old one.
Day / Night mode switch quickly changes text and background colors for comfortable night reading. Adjust colors in Viewing TXT files section of the Application Settings.
Color are adjusted using RGB color model - you use separate Red, Green and Blue sliders to produce a combined color. If you put all three sliders to the left, you'll get black color. If you put all three sliders to the right, you'll get white color.