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[Kniwt]

http://www.archive.org/details/california192427highwacalirich

I've long been a fan of the Internet Archive collection of California Highways and Public Works, but I can't seem to get any of the available formats to display for me on an iPad. I can download full PDFs, but all the pages show up empty even though they open properly from iTunes on the hosting computer. The supposed Epub files are too small and won't even transfer to the iPad.

Perhaps I'm just a clueless n00b, but has anyone been successful at reading these specifically on an iPad? Thanks.

[J N Winkler]

I'm not sure I can help with this specific problem, but I want to thank you for the heads-up that CH&PW is now available online--I wasn't aware the Internet Archive had it, although Google Books now has some old Division of Highways biennial reports available as free ebooks.

Could rendering delays be an issue with the iPad?  Pages in Internet Archive ebook PDFs actually consist of rasters on multiple layers.  This data structure results in PDF files which take very little space on disk but are slow to render in Acrobat and other PDF viewers.  (For casual browsing I would consider the PDFs adequate only on a relatively fast computer--for detailed study I would probably convert the PDFs to JPEG page images.)

[J N Winkler]

Just to add:  I have now downloaded all the volumes of CH&PW that are available through the Internet Archive (19 files, 1.51 GB total) and am in the process of converting them to JPEG.  I expect to have about 16,000 JPEG images (one image per page), or about 11 GB total, when I am done.  Availability spans 1927 to 1967 and there appear to be no lengthy coverage gaps.

[Kniwt]

So, yes, I apparently am a clueless n00b.

After I updated the iPad to iOS 5, the b/w PDFs from the archive appear to load just fine, with only a delay of a second or two to render a new page ... at least for the couple that I've tried so far.

But I'm glad I was able to help at least one other person find this treasure trove!