PDF link opens Drive file in Preview for Mac

Feature requests
#1

Suggestion: it would be amazing, if I could click on the PDF link in Paperpile and have the actual Google Drive document open in Preview (for Mac). This would really ease my workflow. Not sure how many people would benefit, but just thought I could make this suggestion.

#2

I currently do this via 3 three clicks instead of one.

  1. Open PDF in paperpile beta viewer
  2. Using right-top options button and open in google drive.
  3. Hit view in “preview”, to use mac preview.

This works provided you use chrome and have app launcher installed.

#3

Thank you for your suggestion. This can be reduced to a one-step process after taking a few steps:

  1. Go to chrome://plugins and disable “Chrome PDF viewer”.
  2. In Paperpile go to the gear in the upper right --> settings --> browser integration. Under “PDF Viewer” select “Chrome default viewer”. This will make pdf files automatically download when you click on them in your browser. (You can also select “Google Drive” to take one step out of @sahilseth’s solution).
  3. Click on the “View PDF” link on a paper in paperpile. This should make the file download as well as appear in a bar along the bottom of your browser. In this bar click the little arrow next to the filename and select “Always Open With System Viewer”. From now on, all pdfs clicked will automatically be downloaded and opened in your default desktop viewer (usually Preview for OSX).

Note that unlike with @sahilseth’s suggestion, any changes you make to the file will not be synced back to the copy on google drive.

I am curious as to what the benefits are to opening the pdf in Preview, as opposed to the chrome default viewer or our beta viewer?

#4

I use preview to mark my documents (which then need to be synced back to google drive obviously). I haven’t tried the beta viewer in this regard, I think it wasn’t available when I set up my workflow with paperpile…

#5

I had been using preview to annotate. Recently I switched to enhanced beta of metaPDF; and am really pleased to see that annotations are quite user friendly with nice shortcuts.

Barring a few issues mentioned in this forum already, regarding highlighter skipping lines and obscuring text when printing.