Viewing PDF files?

[tstableford]

Dear Camera Bits,
Is it possible to view PDF files as images in Photo Mechanic? I can't find a way to make this happen.
Many thanks,
Tyler Stableford

[Kirk Baker]

Tyler,

Dear Camera Bits,
Is it possible to view PDF files as images in Photo Mechanic? I can't find a way to make this happen.

Not at this time.  However in version 4.5 (in development) non-image files will show up with a 'proxy' thumbnail (it's just an image of the filename's extension) in the Contact Sheet.  You could then drag and drop the PDF files onto a viewer application to see them.

-Kirk

[btombaugh]

Tyler,

Dear Camera Bits,
Is it possible to view PDF files as images in Photo Mechanic? I can't find a way to make this happen.

Not at this time.  However in version 4.5 (in development) non-image files will show up with a 'proxy' thumbnail (it's just an image of the filename's extension) in the Contact Sheet.  You could then drag and drop the PDF files onto a viewer application to see them.

-Kirk

Kirk-

I would love to have the ability to view pdf files in PM. We archive all of our newspaper pages as pdf files, and it is a real pain to look through hundreds of pdfs from the past month to find the pages you want to save for your personal archives - if you don't remember the actually page numbers or dates. All I would need is the ability to view, delete, save and/or save as...

Thanks Kirk!

-Brian

[Kirk Baker]

Brian,

Tyler,

Dear Camera Bits,
Is it possible to view PDF files as images in Photo Mechanic? I can't find a way to make this happen.

Not at this time.  However in version 4.5 (in development) non-image files will show up with a 'proxy' thumbnail (it's just an image of the filename's extension) in the Contact Sheet.  You could then drag and drop the PDF files onto a viewer application to see them.

-Kirk

Kirk-

I would love to have the ability to view pdf files in PM. We archive all of our newspaper pages as pdf files, and it is a real pain to look through hundreds of pdfs from the past month to find the pages you want to save for your personal archives - if you don't remember the actually page numbers or dates. All I would need is the ability to view, delete, save and/or save as...

It is unlikely we would ever get to the point where we would render PDFs such that you would be able to do a Save As... since PDFs are very complex and expensive to render.  So we provide a proxy icon (just a white thumbnail with the letters 'PDF' on them) with which you can launch them, copy them, rename them, and delete them.

We found a nice library that does everything we wanted with PDFs but it costs $10,000 and is just too expensive to justify our simple cross-platform needs.

-Kirk

[SamFrost]

Could you add PDF support on the Mac, since OS X has support for PDFs built in I thought?  Or do you look to keep the feature set similar across platforms?

[Kirk Baker]

Could you add PDF support on the Mac, since OS X has support for PDFs built in I thought?  Or do you look to keep the feature set similar across platforms?

PDFs can take a long time to render.  Also, everything we use to render must be either fully thread-safe or must be serialized so that it becomes safe.

By licensing a library of code that we can examine, we can verify its thread-safety, and have a similar coding interface so we don't have to maintain two separate code bases.

Is it really important to view thumbnails of PDF files?  Why?

-Kirk

[SamFrost]

It's not hugely important for me, but would certainly be useful sometimes.  I just wondered if it would be easy given the OSX support, but I hadn't realised they're slow to render.  The coming proxy thumbnails will be helpful though.  Presumably we'll be able to choose (in preferences?) which file types are shown with a proxy thumbnail, and which are ignored completely (as currently)?

[Kirk Baker]

It's not hugely important for me, but would certainly be useful sometimes.  I just wondered if it would be easy given the OSX support, but I hadn't realised they're slow to render.  The coming proxy thumbnails will be helpful though.  Presumably we'll be able to choose (in preferences?) which file types are shown with a proxy thumbnail, and which are ignored completely (as currently)?

No preference right now, though I suppose we could create some UI where you list the filetypes.  Currently any filetype that does not have a specific handler gets a proxy icon.

-Kirk