PDFs in custom viewer in web app are blurry

[lucidcalib]

I’ve been having issues for quite some time where the PDF in the Paperpile viewer is blurry, whereas when its rendered in any other app (chrome, firefox, okular, etc) it’s fine. Refreshing or zooming does not resolve this issue. Here’s an example:

Default:
Screenshot from 2023-02-08 15-13-18|458x500

Paperpile:
Screenshot from 2023-02-08 15-13-34|458x500

I’m not sure how bad this seems from the screenshots, but to be honest it makes me feel a bit sick because my eyes are trying to focus on the text as if I needed glasses. This unfortunately makes the web app almost unusable for me

[vicente]

Thanks for the report, @lucidcalib – is this happening with any/all PDFs, or specific ones? If the latter, please share some affected files so we can try reproducing on our end. Our PDF viewer is scheduled for updates/improvements later this year, after we’ve released some of what’s currently on the pipeline in the coming months.

[lucidcalib]

This happens with all of them. Additionally, when I look at files that have handwritten annotations in my google drive (i.e. the raw PDFs), I find that the handwriting is missing a lot of granularity and is often very difficult to read. For example, in the web or mobile app:

and

---

vs in the raw PDF on any PDF viewer (Chrome, Firefox, Adobe, okular, etc)

and

You can also actually see the blurriness of the text in those examples too.

[lucidcalib]

FYI this seems to be resolved in the new paperpile app (unclear if it makes much sense because it sounds like the pdf viewer wasn’t updated?), so I’ll keep this thread updated if the issue returns.

However, the second issue I mentioned in the above post (with the corrupted looking pen annotations) remains

[suzanne]

Thanks again for pointing these issues out @lucidcalib. We agree that improvements to the PDF viewer are needed. As Vicente said, our team has planned a rewrite of the PDF viewer, once core functions are completed in the beta Paperpile.