Happy new year! We’re ringing in 2023 with a series of improvements to our PDF viewer, including:
- UI updates
- Perform actions on multiple pages at once
- Collapsed sidebar retention
- Surfacing the Marquee zoom tool
- Advanced settings and downloading PDFs
- Redacting PDFs
- Extracting pages from PDFs
- Comparing PDFs
UI Updates
Perform actions on multiple pages at once
We’ve added a search bar to the thumbnail panel, enabling you to select and manipulate multiple PDFs in one go.
Once you’ve selected multiple pages, use the actions bar to rotate, replace, extract, or delete your selections.
Collapsed sidebar retention
By default, PDFs occupy a small portion of the screen due to the left and right sidebars. Collapsing these bars can make navigating and finding information in PDFs easier, especially when you’re reading small text.
Now, if you collapse these bars, they stay hidden until you expand them, even after closing the viewer window or opening a new document.
To collapse the left sidebar, click the small circle with an arrow. To collapse the right sidebar, click the icon for the tool that’s currently expanded. (For instance, to close Collaboration, click the chat icon.)
Surfacing the Marquee Zoom Tool
Marquee zoom is one of the most powerful tools in our PDF viewer, as it allows you to precisely zoom into specific locations and view small notes. We’ve moved it front and center in the PDF viewer toolbar to make it easier to access.
To use the Marquee zoom tool, click Marquee zoom once (or press Z). Click and drag over the area that you would like to magnify.
Once you use Marquee zoom, you’ll default back to whichever tool you were previously using.
Advanced Settings and Downloading PDFs
Previously, the settings menu and option to download a PDF lived in the top right corner of the PDF viewer. These options have moved to the top left and now include advanced settings options, including Language and Themes (like dark mode!).
Redacting PDFs
We’ve moved our redaction feature to the Redact tab (formerly the Edit tab) and added a few tools, giving you more control as you remove sensitive information from prints.
To access the redaction tools, select Redact at the top of the PDF viewer.
To redact part of a page, click Redact and highlight text or click and drag over sensitive info. Alternatively, select Redact pages to redact whole pages.
Click the check box to save the redacted PDF as a supporting file. (Note that the original PDF will not be impacted.)
Once you’ve created a redacted version of the drawing, you can download it from the Files tab or share it securely through the platform with External share.
Extracting Pages from PDFs
If you’re quoting more than one part off of one multi-page PDF, splitting the document into one page per part can streamline the quoting process and improve traceability. Use the new Extract action in the thumbnail panel to locally download pages from a PDF.
To extract a page, open the thumbnail panel and click the three dots beneath the page you want to extract. Select Extract to locally download the page.
Comparing PDFs
Let’s say you receive a new revision of a print and need to compare it to the previous version. Use the Comparison tool to quickly identify removed, added, and identical content between two PDFs.
To compare PDFs, open the thumbnail panel and select Compare PDFs. Click Upload to browse your computer and select the comparison file.
Once you’ve uploaded a comparison file, use color to identify key differences between the two documents.
- Red content has been removed and is no longer present in the uploaded drawing.
- Blue content has been added and was not present in the original drawing.
- Black content is identical between both drawings.
For example, let’s say you’re in the process of quoting part 5-X-9B when you receive a revision (part 5-X-9 C).
While you’re viewing 5-X-9 B, upload 5-X-9 C in the Compare PDFs tab:
In the top left corner of the drawing, item 5 is written in blue. That tells us that a requirement for separate packaging has been added to the new revision.
And on the right, this radius was increased to .10 inches in rev C from .05 inches for rev B.
