Compression of pdf shown on paperpile viewer

Support
#1

Some of the pdf s that I view via Paperpile are of significantly lower quality than the ones I uploaded in the first place. If I download the pdf to view on the computer the quality is fine.

Are you compressing the pdfs that you send to the Paperpile viewer?

If so you are compressing them to such an extent that the Paperpile viewer will be unusable in some cases or offer a much low quality experience to the user. Does this explain the slow load speed as you compress them before you send them? I see this is a major issue I do not want to download all the pdfs again after opening the viewer in order to get a good quality pdf to use as this totally impractical. If Google Drive is sync’d with the computer in use can you not use the pdf stored on the computer itself and maintain quality? If you are doing this I will sync Google Drive which I have not done at the moment.

I don’t intend to use two reference managers so this issue will definitely stop me from signing up after the 30 day trial.

Please tell me how I can resolve this or fix this issue.
Thanks

#2

We don’t compress or change anything else with your files. The difference you see can only be explained by how the different viewers display the PDFs.

The current viewer uses the default PDF viewing capabilities of Chrome. Depending on what you are using on your computer there might be differences.

You can try switching to the Google Drive viewer (Settings > Browser integration > PDF viewer) but it’s usually not the better option compared to the built in Chrome viewer.

Finally we will release a new viewer soon that allows annotations. It will be different from the Chrome PDF viewer.

In any case the file is always the same but technical differences lead to slight differences how PDFs come across.

2 Likes
#3

Thanks Stefan. I now understand the issue more clearly.

I look forward to your new viewer and the annotations capability which as you know is also a key feature.

#4

Hi phytat, hi Stephan,

I am experiencing the same with very few PDF’s on Linux using Chromium browser. It’s not about quality in my case but about text positioning, like overlapping columns. Stephan’s suggestion to switch to Google Drive Viewer solved that for me! But as I said I have only a handful of them and none of them is so relevant that I need to open them repeatedly.

Thank you!