N800's screen is a little small to read PDFs, because the PDFs are not reformatable. I had tried to convert PDFs to some other formats, but the converters are not good enough to handle tables and equations. I think they are ok to convert plain text only.

have you tried evince?

I recommend ePDF Viewer. Isn't all that flashy, but is reliable, quick, and has a fair amount of options.

What kind of documents are you reading? For pages that have columns (e.g. academic papers, magazine articles), I find it convenient to rotate the pdf (in evince) to portrait view, and zoom to the width of the column.

Agree with Baksiidaa. I read academic papers zoomed to column width daily on my N800. Student papers are a bit more of a pain (a pdf viewer that automatically scales zoom to printed width would be a nice thing). That said, I seem to spend as much time reading papers in xournal 9so I can doodle comments and suggestions on them) as I do in the dedicated pdf viewer.

I'm having problems installing evince. Trying from the application manager as well as the maemo downloads, I get a 'installation file corrupted' error.

I've searched for solutions and found quite a few threads, most pretty old and not helping me. Is there a how to somewhere?

I have an N800 with OS2008..

Thanks

EDIT: Ok, I got it now. I played around with repository settings, can't really say what did it. Maybe replacing the 'repostory' which I still had in there with the proper 'repository'..

Since PDF reading is one of my priorities I tried built-in reader, ePDF and evince. Evince wins the match although it's "fit to screen" is not working correctly in portrait mode. Fine zoom setting would help also.
Evince IS heavy but it's capability to display continuously without dividing into pages makes it far better since next page is pre-rendered in advance.
Comparing to native reader - evince properly displays transparent marks on pdf done with Xournal exporter.
Using Xournal as reader - good for limited documents because pages are rendered as bitmaps - all pages at once so opening ie 200 pages of document leads to extensive memory usage (once I even had to use 512MB swap file for that purpose).
My dream for evince is something like "library" in FBreader when I can fast switch back to pdf that I've been reading few days ago.
Unfortunately searching for a file using graphical file manager is painfully slow especially if there's a lot of content on big mmc. (Xournal is worst at this - It doesn't even remember from where the file was loaded for annotation - each time it runs file selection from home directory)

Not strictly related, but... What do you people think about converting pdf's into .cbr style books ? Yes, it would increase file size significantly and disable text select/searches, but would also speed up plain reading significantly.

I'm thinking of adding such an option to my pet pyqtoreader project - it would render via poppler libs and then save it in a png cache for quick referencing.

Also - do you ever (wish to) annotate pdfs ?