ch...@cwfent.com
I've been using PDFTron/DocPub for about a year now integrated into our own app with 20,000+ pdfs2xods.There are a ton of good things, you guys know PDF's (no doubt about it), letting people run docpub and keep everything on their own servers is also huge and the open flexibility of webviewer is another awesome feature. I've been at scribd, Issuu, flipbook etc and because we want to host everything ourselves, I even messed with things like flashpaper and flexpaper (shudder).
There is just 1 complaint I constantly get from users, staff and everyone else... They HATE the UI of the viewer, its 99% of all the complaints we get in relation to what we use webviewer for. I understand the desire to keep everything the same across the board (html5,flash, silverlight) but the constant comparison I have to hear between webviewer and all the other services out there is what really holds me back from doing more with it. It's so hard to explain to folks on this end that its everything but the viewer is why we use this as nobody else can do everything else even half as well (it just goes over everyone's head because all they ever see is the viewer).
Everyone these days want a flipbook, no matter where you go there are minor differences in the features but almost all of the them have the same basic type of flipbook layout, it looks good, allows paging through the pages, good page turning animation and good download and print abilities (any because its flash, no js full screen popup issues, good initial magnification etc)
I've talked to some flash guys that have pretty much told me its too big of a project unless I happen to come across someone who is really familiar with the PDFTron SDK. I even spent a couple of weeks going back and forth with people from support on a custom build, but it became clear there was no real interest there.
I'm sorry but the example webview with turn.js is really bad, you can't compare that to any of the hundreds of flipbook services or downloads (no offense meant). I also know a LOT of these services use PDFTron as their backend (they just have their own frontend which is normally very good), so I'm sure webviewer COULD provide a awesome experience.
IMO if the flash guys @ PDFTron just opened up something like issuu or scribd and just did something similar as a "extra flash addon" or something, it would make webview much more popular. Heck, make it something you have to buy, I'd buy one!
Maybe if others feel the same and say something, PDFTron would consider it (but considering how "into" this space they are, I'd be surprised if a "better flash only viewer" hasn't come up before).
Support
Thank you for the honest feedback! The default UI for the desktop WebViewer was created a few years ago and it is showing its age. The UI is provided as something to get you started and we expect that most WebViewer users will want to customize it to match their brand and improve the look and functionality.
The WebViewer allows you to heavily customize the user interface and user experience but obviously for more complicated customizations it may take more time.
We've been mainly concentrating on the core technology side of things to make sure that the documents are faithfully reproduced, rending performance is high and that our customers have all flexibility and power to implement whatever they need.
With that said, it seems that WebViewer SDK comes across to many users as a 'Ferrari engine in a 3-year-old beige Corolla body'… so we would like to change that image and improve the default reader in WebViewer.
At the same time it is important to keep in mind that almost every WebViewer would like to use in a different way. Some WebViewer users need flipbook experience, others need scrolling. Even when it comes to flipbook there is so many different and conflicting requirements that it is unlikely we will ever be able to meet all of them. And for many of our users this is a matter of competitive advantage (i.e. they use user experience as a differentiator for other WebViewer implementations).
Btw. we are about to release WebViewer 1.8 and one of improvements will be a bit nicer looking default viewer. Here is a sample link shared via Xodo (a free app that uses WebViewer for real time online collaboration on PDF):
http://xodo.com/view/#/collab/242ab2c3-ae52-4eaa-892a-a46f1ae6c8e7
Based on what you are saying below it seems that you are particularly interested in flipbook style viewer & Flash? Is this correct? Although WebViewer still works with Silverlight / Flash it seems that these technologies are rapidly 'falling out of favor' and are being abandoned by their creators (i.e. MS & Adobe). We noticed that many of our clients already moved to HTML5. Perhaps it makes more sense to focus on this platform?
ch...@cwfent.com
Thanks for the reply.
I know one of the best features of webviewer is its highly configurable and customizable but its also a large project and even if you have the skills it's still quite the task to have the understanding one would need to make radical changes to the functionality of the viewer to do something like a whole new viewer experience.
As far as the flipbook and flash viewer, I honestly believe that a good flipbook is the major thing that webviewer lacks, all one needs to do is look around or in PDFTron's case, look at the majority of your own customers that licence your tech to provide online services... Pretty much everyone is offering a flipbook as the default, issuu, scribd, flipbook, uberflip etc (pretty much wherever you look) and its also true that on the detail level there are a lot of differences between them but they all share a certain type of base functionality ex. good auto sizing of the viewer in the browser, good page turning animation and print and download. It seems like a basic flipbook flash addon to webviewer wouldn't be a large task to those that are familiar with the SDK and webviewer and it would be 100x better then that horrible (and almost unusable) flipbook example using turn.js.
As far as flash, I agree with you, flash's days are limited but they will still be around for a while yet because browsers simply cannot provide the same functionality in HTML5 yet, IE 10 was the first time they even offered a full screen JS ability and it didn't even work right (and you know as well as I do that there are people out there still using IE 6). IE9 for Cors support etc. I would be surprised if things like flash didn't still have at least a couple of years left (and then you will always people that "prefer" it one way and will never change).
I was really hoping this thread would attract others looking for the same thing as I'm sure they are out there and maybe get PDFTron to think about it, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any interest from those that monitor this group. I believe a good flipbook option would give webviewer far more appeal and would be well worth the investment. I know this to be fact because we have about 750,000 users across multiple domains and more then 95% of any feedback we get is about how much they hate the viewer and why can't we have something like issuu or scribd or any of the other dozen sites the end users are interested it.
If you guys ever change your mind or if there is any really good flash guys out there thinking about making their own, please let me know, I'd kick in for it and help in any way I could to make it happen. Webviewer is the perfect product for us to integrate into everything we do and there is nothing else I would rather use but sooner or later the people higher up that simply don't understand what is needed beyond the end result are going to make us change just because of the feedback from the users who simply do not like the UI and want something "like all the other sites out there use" (dumb quote from a complaint).
Thanks for listening!