Currently, the chrome extension for paperpile is required to read PDFs in the browser.
However, my Uni laptop doesn’t let me install chrome extensions. This means I can’t view, read, or reference my PDFs while working on my work computer. I can only use paperpile on my personal computer. This is a real shame.
It would be amazing if the plugin was not required, or if at least limited functionality was possible without the chrome plugin.
Just ask your IT-department to put the extension on the whitelist.
That was my first thought too. Unfortunately they don’t have a whitelist and don’t allow extensions. It’s frustrating, but I can imagine if this happens to me it happens to more folks.
The extension provides the majority of the service’s functionality; adding papers to your library, sourcing the correct reference information, sorting your library by label/folder, and so on.
However, it isn’t explicitly required if you only want to read PDFs that are already in your library. Those are just stored in a folder of your Google Drive account. That means they can be opened just like any other PDF, using either the local GDrive app or the web interface at https://drive.google.com
You won’t be able to use all the metadata for sorting the library, but Google has pretty good search functionality within Drive - including the full-text search.
Your highlights and comments are embedded in the PDF too, so anything you do outside of Paperpile’s extension should be visible within it once you get back to your personal computer.
You are right, @Maura – a fair amount of users have reported this limitation over the years, so we do have plans to enable usage of our features without the browser extension in the future.
Thanks @Daniel and @Kyle_Marriott for your thoughts!