View PDF files stored on the website in the browser
Allow PDF (and other browser viewable files) to be viewed in the browser.
The Seattle Sea Kayaking Committee is storing minutes as PDF documents. When you click on the file name (blue) what happens depends on the browser you are using. Some browsers (Firefox) allows the user to choose to download or view in a browser window. Other browsers (Safari and Chrome on Mac) always download the file.
If I just want to view the file, having it downloaded to my computer is inconvenient. Now I must navigate to the downloaded file, open it, and later decide if I want to keep it. This inconvenience is multiplied when I search through past minutes for when a topic has been discussed. Every document that matches must be downloaded and then opened.
It would be far more convenient if I could just open the PDF in a browser window. From there I can later decide if I wish to save the document to my computer. This functionality should be applied to all browser viewable formats. Images are the other category that come to mind.
Tom Unger
shared this idea
Hello Tom & Others -
I am reaching out as this idea is moving from Proposed to Priority. I have identified the configuration setting in the code that is defaulting to download vs. view in browser behavior and am confident that with our new development environment our staff/volunteers have access to, we can complete this with minimal external development resources! This would be a huge benefit to desktop/mobile users. I hope to accomplish this over the next month or so and will convert this idea to "In Progress" once development has started.
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Hello Matt -
Great call out that it is important to have our search functionality include the text from the many PDFs on our website. The good news is that our current search (Apache Solr Search) does just that! I do however understand that part of the ask is to make it easier to see the information from the PDFs on the site versus downloading them and I have seen your comment on this similar idea.
https://feedback.mountaineers.org/forums/273688/suggestions/42367795
That said, I am going to merge these ideas together to represent a more user-friendly viewing of that PDF information given the search request you have above is active today.
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Matt Simerson
commented
Look at the results of this search: https://www.mountaineers.org/search#SearchableText=behavior&path=%2Fabout%2Fvision-leadership%2Fboard-of-directors%2Fboard-policies
Every single result is a link to a page that contains nothing but a PDF. This is lousy for SEO, which means you likely don't find what you're after using a search engine and it's also a lousy mobile experience. Extract the text from the PDFs and put it on the web page. Even badly formatted text is better than "only available in this PDF."
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Matt Simerson
commented
A much better solution is to copy/paste the text from the PDF into the web page so that nothing needs to be downloaded. Leave a link to the PDF for those who want / need to download it.