Displaying mixed text and images in iOS app

[Richard Miller]

I am building an iOS app in which I need to display numerous (upwards of 50) documents that contain mixed text and images. A typical doc would be about three legal pages long and might contain 5–6 small images interspersed among the text. Basically, Word documents. When displaying each doc, I want the user to stay within my app. The user will need to be able to scroll within each doc. These card documents will all be built in advance in the app (i.e. not dynamically).

I know I can do this using a simple group scroller on a card (using numerous text fields and images), but my tests with this approach yielded a clunky, slow scrolling experience when I tested this on a iPad 2. Plus, it is messy to build each document/card in this manner. There must be a better way.

Should I look at displaying PDFs? If so, will this approach give the appearance of being well integrated into the app without navigating outside the app?

Or, should I convert all the docs to HTML and use an integrated browser object on each card to display this data?

Or has someone built some kind of external tool I can purchase for this purpose?

Thanks for any feedback.
Richard Miller