Open file browser improvement suggestion

Feature requests
#1

Continuing the discussion from Highlight and annotate PDFs: now in beta:

I am having troubles with the annotator interface. I need to open a PDF file, and I know where it is in my Google Drive folder structure, but file opener dialog in MetaPDF gives me a flat list of all files on my drive. I have no clue how the file is called, I just imported a directory into the drive! Can you provide a more usable interface?

If this is not the preferred way to provide feedback for the annotator, sorry, and please let me know how this should be done instead.

#2

This is the Google Drive file open interface provided by Google. We will have a look if there are any options we missed but at least for the moment we don’t have the resources trying to provide a better file picker than Google itself.

But you always can just go to drive.google.com and find the PDFs there. Then you can open them with “Open with MetaPDF”.

And yes, that’s the correct place for feedback. Thanks!

1 Like
#3

Ah, indeed! I am not sufficiently familiar with the Google Drive features :slight_smile:

This resolve the issue for me (at least, makes it far less critical). Thanks!

#4

As I just now (!!!) realized, when I open a PDF of the paper from Paperpile, there is an option on top of the screen to open the PDF with one of the connected apps, which effectively integrates MetaPDF with Paperpile directly!

This may be obvious to most, but I wanted to mention it in the context of this topic. Very cool!

#5

This is cool, but why doesn’t it automatically open in MetaPDF, given that I’ve told Google Drive (in its settings) to use MetaPDF automatically. If I open a pdf from Google Drive, it opens directly in MetaPDF. Good. But, even if the “Browser Integrations/Preferred PDF Viewer” settings in PaperPile say to use Google Drive, it still opens in the Drive viewer, not MetaPDF. It’s not a big deal, and I know eventually MetaPDF and Paperpile will be seamlessly integrated, but still curious why this is?

1 Like
#6

I didn’t know this could be done, thanks for this hint, very helpful!

#7

Is there some other app or file-open manager you have running because my screen doesn’t look that way - the dark bar has different options in the chrome PDF viewer - or some setting in Chrome somewhere I’ve missed?

#8

#9

I think yours is configured to use default (Chrome) PDF viewer. I have this in the settings:

I also have this in my Google Drive settings to use MetePDF by default:

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#10

Thanks - you solved it - yes, I did also need to ensure the default (Chrome) PDF viewer plugin was enabled. So three things needed to sync (as you said). Here I am clarifying for others.

  1. default PDF viewer plugin enabled in chrome://plugins
  2. Preferred PDF viewer set to Google Drive in Paperpile-settings-browser integration
  3. drive.google.com setting-manage apps-check MetaPDF “use by default”