Hi, Is there a way of clicking on view pdf and going to the system default pdf app (in my case PDF Pen) instead of the Paperpile viewer.
When I change the viewer in settings, use ‘google drive’ works, but use ‘default viewer’ take’s me into a viewer which looks remarkably like the Paperpile one.
Whilst waiting for the ability to annotate in the Paperpile viewer to come online, I would like to use PDF Pen from Paperpile if possible. So that I can click on view pdf and go into an app that allows and shows annotations.
I realise that this might be a Chrome issue rather than a Paperpile one so if anyone knows how to do the above I would be grateful.
What you’re seeing is the built-in PDF viewer in Chrome (the Paperpile viewer is based on it). To change it, go to chrome://plugins, find ‘Chrome PDF Viewer’, and click Disable. Then click enable under the PDF Pen plugin entry.
Hopefully, that will cause Chrome to default to the PDF Pen Viewer!
I can’t really find out in what cases Paperpile/ Google Docs features “Open” or “Open With” for PDFs. I have my Paperpile default viewer set to Google Docs, but find that I have to click through to Open with another reader to be useful. I realise that closer MetaPDF integration is coming, which is great.
Sometimes Google Docs has “Open” and sometimes “Open With…” I can’t tell what the case is that makes this different.
It would be great to have the options to:
When the user clicks on “View PDF” to open the PDF in the user’s system default desktop application directly from Google Drive (not some embedded application within Chrome- Adobe Reader and Chrome don’t work together anymore). The web-based ones are coming up way too slowly and often have a “Whoops” message on bigger files.
In MetaPDF to have the option to Open With Acrobat Reader or any other system PDF reader directly from Google Drive.
The only ways I can get my system PDF reader to open a PDF is to not have any PDF readers set in Chrome, which forces a download of a COPY of the file, which opens in my default reader… but I want to open the Google Drive version so that my annotations are stored there. Not sure what the technical barriers to this are, but I imagine there is a reason this is not possible right now.
I am not sure what happened, but after I upgraded to MAC OS El Capitan, Google Drive offers the option to open the document in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. It seems to work offline and opens the original file in Google Drive, saving the changes there. Highlights are also recognised by MetaPDF, which is great. I wonder if this feature request could then be modified to suggest that the user has the option to set the default PDF viewer to Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, as I imagine the option for MetaPDF will appear. As it is, I think I like the simplicity of MetaPDF better but I need to use them both more to be sure.
I guess what happened is that you installed the Google Drive sync client, right? This is a desktop application that can talk to the Google Drive webapp/Chrome extension. As a desktop application it has the permissions to open a file using other Desktop applications.
That’s not possible for Paperpile though. The Paperpile extension is not allowed to communicate with the Google Drive client. We don’t have plans to write our own desktop client.
MetaPDF is designed to work seamlessly with other PDF annotators so you can use whatever application you want to annotate a file in your Google Drive.
It’s just not possible to directly open it from Paperpile, you need to open it either through the Google Drive web-app or directly from your hard disk.