*As of 09/08/2021 we’ve revamped our PDF previewer and even introduced the ability to annotate PDFs. Visit suitefiles.com/features/pdf-tools/ to see how SuiteFiles can help you work across all file types.
As the user base for SuiteFiles continues to grow we’re getting more and more questions about our PDF preview functionality.
Our Customers Love PDFs
To be honest, it surprised us how many PDFs were being uploaded into SuiteFiles. At last look some 40% of all files in SuiteFiles were PDFs. It turns out that our customers we’re being emailed a lot of PDFs and uploading them along with producing a lot of PDFs themselves.
PDFs in a Web Browser
Web based systems that open PDF files download the file into the browser before displaying it. For large PDFs this could take a little time and if your internet plan is restricted by a data cap it could eat into that.
As a result we built a PDF previewer into SuiteFiles.
The previewer takes your PDF and converts each page into a low resolution image to display. This saves both download time and data. By default SuiteFiles will open any PDF file it can into the previewer.
Limitations
It must be noted that this is a preview tool. The quality of the PDF images created can be low and in some cases even unreadable (there are many reasons why this can happen). We work hard to remove these issues but there are many, many ways to create a PDF and it’s only when we see new issues that we can resolve them.
What the Previewer Can Do
The PDF previewer does the following:
- Displays a thumbnail image of each page in the document down the left side of the screen
- Allows you to scroll back and forth through the pages,
- Rotate the file,
- Open the file in the full default PDF plugin for your browser (downloading the full quality original PDF), and
- Zoom in and out of the preview.
Being built into SuiteFiles the PDF previewer also allows users to share the PDF with other people and also download it directly to the hard drive.
We think the PDF previewer is a pretty cool feature in SuiteFiles that other cloud file management systems don’t have. Hopefully you think so too.
