It’s no secret that I love the cloud and try to keep all of my data in it. So when Google announced that they added PDF support a few weeks ago, I was listening. Last night I had the bright idea to move my treasured PDFs from my S3 account to Google Docs, where I would easily be able to read them with Google’s built-in preview and access the original files. Furthermore, I figured Google would have tied in PDF support with Google Gears, which allows users to put Google Docs to work even when offline.
PDF support in Google Docs seems to be lackluster at best. While I am fully aware they did not aim to include PDF editing for whatever reason, that’s fine with me – just being able to easily read PDFs is enough. Unfortunately, Google didn’t even get that part right.
- The PDF preview mode of Google Docs doesn’t include any sort of zoom functionality, so you’re left reading your PDF at an uncomfortable size.
- Google Gears does not allow you to access PDFs in offline mode.
- PDF search will tell you that there are 314 matches for “ruby” in your PDF but it will let you figure out on which pages those matches are. It would be nice to have a list view for search matches, like OS X Preview.
- The preview mode stops caring after 100 pages and won’t display anything more.
- Embedded links within PDFs are not clickable.
- PDFs not viewable in the Google Docs mobile interface.
I want to use Google Docs as an online media hub to store and view various files online without having to download the original and tinker with it locally but that dream will have to wait.
Have you tried uploading a PDF to Google Docs? Do you use Google Docs regularly?
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{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
I love Google Docs. It gives me a nice place to type my paper and spell check quickly before I transfer it into LaTeX which I then turn into a pdf file. I’ve messed around with uploading pdf files, but it defeats most of the purpose of Google Docs for me, which is composing the actual document. Google seemed to just hack pdf support in, but it doesn’t fit with the rest of the Google Docs experience, at least in my opinion.
Also, nice choice of pdf document for the example. Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby is amazing.
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As much as I use google docs for my files, I’d have to say that there not the only ones in this market. In the meantime, there is of course runner up: viewer.zoho.com that handles pdfs pretty well.
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this is good enough for me.
what I think is missing is mobile support, and email upload.
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@David – you can upload via email. Go to the upload page and you’ll see a special email you can send documents to. As for mobile support, do you have an iPhone? A mobile version automatically loads, however you can’t view PDFs in it:
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yah, my sr design group just tried to save a google word doc as pdf for something, and it really messed up with all the images we had in there or charts and er diagrams — It would only show half of the picture, or none at all. It seems like it’ll just take some time, and a lot of tweaking, and it’ll be like every other wonderful google service.
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I use Google Docs the way I think it makes sense to me: store all my documents that I do not want to have on my Mac, just so I do not have to delete it. So, for that matter, I don’t really care about a sophisticated pdf support. What I find really annoying about Google Docs: I have no option so see when the original uploaded file was created and I don’t really get why. I hope there’s going to be some improvements there.
But you’re right: Search really sucks. But I guess they are working behind the scenes. I don’t really see why they shouldn’t work out a more effective pdf support.
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Have you checked out Acrobat.com? In the My Files part of the website, you can store up to 5 GB of files with no file size limit. As far as PDF support goes, there is a zoom feature and the interface is slick and flashy. Alas, there’s no ability to search the PDFs; I made a few attempts to create a PDF document, but Adobe Reader couldn’t open it. BTW, there is an Adobe AIR app (Acrobat.com for My Desktop) that interfaces with Acrobat.com, but I think that you can’t work offline with it. It’s useful to me because Flash 10 often crashes my Firefox.
Since Google Docs added the Print Layout to its word processor, it instantly became more useful to me for simple collaborative editing. Other than that, I don’t use Google Docs that much; I use Word 2007 most of the time.
http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/07/03/who-owns-your-online-documents/
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@David – Google already has all my email, having a few extra PDFs (which are mostly coding tech refs anyways) isn’t going to cause any harm, now is it?
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no, but its a comment for people that do a lot of work and produce a lot of PDFs. I for one do not want google gaining access to my PDFs. I have a lot of patentable research and products contained within.
When using gmail I encrypt content i don’t want anyone to see.
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Not being able to zoom is a letdown. That’s usually the first thing I do with PDF files, and then several times while reading.
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I tried printing from Google Docs once; screwed up the page, so I’m indifferent to GDocs. :)
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I find it generally really useful. And was pumped when they releases PDF support. Makes life easier for sure.
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I’m glad they added PDF support, albeit limited. But would be really awesome would be a way to go from printing a web page to a PDF in Google Docs. The closest thing I can find is here: http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Print_Anything_To_Google_Docs
If you can find something better that accomplishes the same thing let me know. I’m constantly scanning docs to PDF, it would be nice to automate the upload to Google Docs.
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The non-clickable links has to be a huge error that Google should be working on. It seems odd that they would leave out one of the cornerstones of PDF functionality…unless there was a security flaw???
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RE: The PDF preview mode of Google Docs doesn’t include any sort of zoom functionality, so you’re left reading your PDF at an uncomfortable size.
http://www.getfirefox.com
;)