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REQUEST: Why not directly display PDFs? (on iPad)


mic

Idea

When a note is consisting of just one single PDF the concept of showing the thumbnail isn't really satisfying.

Especially with small, one or two-page PDFs, why aren't they displayed directly with a double click taking the user to the existing full screen viewer!?

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hi mic. i don't know the answer to your question, but my guess would be that such a feature would slow the ipad down. it would be nice if we had that option (as we do on the desktop versions).

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your guess is wrong. The iPad is very fast and a task like this is perfectly feasible while staying responsive.

hi. well, i guess we have different impressions of the ipad. i could be wrong, of course. at any rate, it would be nice to have a choice.

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Usually, if there's native support for displaying PDFs, Evernote will take advantage of it. If not, they're stuck needing a 3rd-party tool. Not sure if there is easy OS support for PDFs in iOS. The other possibility is that it's in the works, just not delivered yet.

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(Of course) iOS has support for rendering PDFs (there's a ZoomingPDFViewer sample code from Apple if you're wondering)

Instead of having the somewhat tedious "thumbnail click -> fullscreen", the same viewer could be in the larger bottom half (right half in landscape) and right away (or be it after a 0.1 second delay) display the PDF :)

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yes, there is native support for viewing pdfs, and the viewer appears if we click on a pdf.

as evernote already takes a bit long to display my notes, my own preference would be for evernote to work on further speeding up and streamlining the app. also, unless you have your pdfs in an offline notebook, evernote would have to download each one as well. that takes several seconds already.

i'll be interested to hear what the develors have to say.

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What's "interesting", or rather depressing, is that any file is opened with the speed of lightning in dropbox. High-res pictures, pdf:s and doc:s are displayed all in the blink of an eye. So, it's the app, not the files or the iPad. And why, why, why display both folders and sub-folders? Very annoying, as it keeps me from creating the order I want in the desktop version, since multiple sub-folders make it's so hard to find the files on the iPad.

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Hi nothgirl. Welcome to the user forums!

If I understand you correctly, you brought up two important points: the time it takes to display a PDF and the lack of stacks (sub-folders) in the current iPad user interface.

Regarding the first one, I have not experienced a huge difference between Dropbox and Evernote. I do think Dropbox downloads the PDFs a little more quickly over wifi. However, if you make a PDF offline in Evernote, it will load more quickly. Both use the same Apple PDF viewer to display the PDFs, so the results are identical. At least, that is waht I am seeing. Maybe I am misunderstanding you.

Regarding the second, I think this is an issue a lot of people have mentioned, and I have it in my thread floating around somewhere full of suggestions for improving the iPad user interface. I don't use stacks myself, but I certainly see their utility, and I think the developers would probably agree.

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Regarding the first one, I have not experienced a huge difference between Dropbox and Evernote. I do think Dropbox downloads the PDFs a little more quickly over wifi. However, if you make a PDF offline in Evernote, it will load more quickly. Both use the same Apple PDF viewer to display the PDFs, so the results are identical. At least, that is waht I am seeing. Maybe I am misunderstanding you.

This has nothing to do with online or offline. I don't have a subscription and still a PDF that you've downloaded will stay cached in your local database.

If you access a PDF and then turn WiFi off, you can still access it, even after quitting Evernote.

The PDF viewer is just slow and I'd appreciate if they'd make it faster and directly display the PDF if that's the only content of a note (as is the case in the majority of my notes).

I'll check out the dropbox app though.

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Regarding the first one, I have not experienced a huge difference between Dropbox and Evernote. I do think Dropbox downloads the PDFs a little more quickly over wifi. However, if you make a PDF offline in Evernote, it will load more quickly. Both use the same Apple PDF viewer to display the PDFs, so the results are identical. At least, that is waht I am seeing. Maybe I am misunderstanding you.

This has nothing to do with online or offline. I don't have a subscription and still a PDF that you've downloaded will stay cached in your local database.

If you access a PDF and then turn WiFi off, you can still access it, even after quitting Evernote.

The PDF viewer is just slow and I'd appreciate if they'd make it faster and directly display the PDF if that's the only content of a note (as is the case in the majority of my notes).

I'll check out the dropbox app though.

Online/offline most certainly has a bearing on the subject. Recent notes are cached. Cached being the operative word. When something is cached, it may well be gone the next time you want it if the cache was used for something else.

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Wanted to resurrect this discussion for emphasis.  The opening and closing of pdfs on an ipad is really annoying.  It takes four clicks (two to open & two to close) a pdf in the ipad version.  Please give us an inline view

 

The good news for me is that I am running out of things to complain about in the ipad version.  I am down to two big ones;  opening pdf's and the ridiculous and gigantic icons used for notebooks and notes (and the fact that they can only be grouped by months or name alphabetically).  People will always have issues but these two jump out at me every time I open the app!

 

Hugh

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Apparently EN's iPad app has been updated in the last couple days with a new PDF viewer. Does it now allow inline PDFs?...and are they able to be stored offline? I haven't bought my iPad yet and I am very curious about this feature. My future uses will require me to search and quickly pull up notes consisting almost exclusively of PDF content, and looking at an attachment icon as opposed to the first page will really slow me down, especially when it comes to figuring out which PDF has the content most relevant to my search inquiry. Can someone install the new update and let me know?

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Apparently EN's iPad app has been updated in the last couple days with a new PDF viewer. Does it now allow inline PDFs?...and are they able to be stored offline? I haven't bought my iPad yet and I am very curious about this feature. My future uses will require me to search and quickly pull up notes consisting almost exclusively of PDF content, and looking at an attachment icon as opposed to the first page will really slow me down, especially when it comes to figuring out which PDF has the content most relevant to my search inquiry. Can someone install the new update and let me know?

 

Nope, same flow for pdfs.  You will see a thumbnail but if you click on it you will get a screen with just the title of the pdf.  You then have to click on that and it will open in the (very nice, new) pdf viewer.  I just don't get this.  I can think of no reason for clicking on a pdf note other than to look at it.  It can't be a speed question since I have to click twice to get to to see the pdf.  If there is a way, I hope EN implements inline viewing on the iPad.

 

Besides this will give us a chance to complain about the slow opening time (we're never happy...)

 

Hugh

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If the reason for not making PDFs display immediatly upon opening the note, is due to the delay caused while downloading, and the space that downloading a PDF takes up, then how about just displaying a much higher res thumbnail inside the note? With the option to then download the actual PDF if required.

 

This should enable you at the very least to work out if it's the correct PDF before downloading it, and could also allow you to read the document without needing to download and open the full PDF.

 

A low quality JPG, with the resolution of the iPhone screen would surffice, and would be about 20kb, vs over 10 times that for the full PDF.

 

With this method, you'd quickly be able to view the file, and often probably not need to actually then download the full PDF.

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If the reason for not making PDFs display immediatly upon opening the note, is due to the delay caused while downloading, and the space that downloading a PDF takes up, then how about just displaying a much higher res thumbnail inside the note? With the option to then download the actual PDF if required.

 

This should enable you at the very least to work out if it's the correct PDF before downloading it, and could also allow you to read the document without needing to download and open the full PDF.

 

A low quality JPG, with the resolution of the iPhone screen would surffice, and would be about 20kb, vs over 10 times that for the full PDF.

 

With this method, you'd quickly be able to view the file, and often probably not need to actually then download the full PDF.

That would be simply excellent!!!  :D

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BUMP AGAIN!  I would REALLY like this feature.  This is a major sticking point for me with our field people who only have iPads. Just about everything I share with them is PDF and they have to perform extra steps to view the PDF.  PLEASE Evernote make this available soon.

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Moar bump. I'm looking for a general Everything Box for storing and editing stuff between my iPad and desktop, and inline display of PDFs in Evernote (maybe with some basic markup features, and ideally with support for Skim highlights) would pretty much allow me to ditch the other apps I'm using at the moment.

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+1

 

I suspect the reason is the difficulty in getting arbitrary PDFs to display instantly on note load.  Can I suggest creating a thumbnail of the first page and lower res thumbnails of the next few pages to tide the user over until the PDF has fully loaded?

 

FWIW, iPad Mail displays single page PDFs inline.

 

It is also really annoying to have to page through a PDF on Windows - I would much rather scroll up and down to see the pages (like Adobe Reader).

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1 hour ago, mbmtflannery said:

I'm still waiting for this feature.  It is one of the major things that keeps from diving into Evernote full on.  Other programs can do it.  Why can't Evernote???

Hi,

We have a new note editor coming soon that will allow us to build out features such as this more easily. Displaying PDFs in-line is a feature we will consider for a future release.

Cheers,
Chuck

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+1

I'm sure there are other uses, but I'll tell you how I think I'd use it most.  I take a lot of handwritten notes on my iPad Pro via another app, and I also take some on paper and then scan them into evernote.  Some of those I want to come visit later and transcribe.  I tag them so I can do so, but it's really had to transcribe them on the iPad because I can't look both at the PDF and have a place to type.

The best I can do now is use another app for one of those purposes in split screen mode, or to use my computer instead.

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Any advance on this? Still seeing PDFs (small, under 1 MB files) as thumbnails, but only as attachments in the main note on the iPad Pro iOS 15.0.2. 

 

The roundabout solution seems to be to convert the PDFs to JPGs, where it displays on the main note. But that’s a lot of cleanup for an option that should be available, unless I’m missing something…

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No advances, but EN never comments on their internal plans. It may show with the next release, next year, never …

JPG and pdf is not comparable - JPG is always a one „page“ file, be it one picture, one scan, one whatever. PDFs are by design multipaged documents, and they are sort of a frozen pages view of a print output.

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