Upgrading from webviewer v5 with XOD to v8 with PDF a good/bad idea? Best practices advice

[JasonD]

We currently have webviewer v5 installed using XOD’s converted from PDF. Xod are used here as they appeared to be faster at the time for viewing 30-80MB files. We are planning an upgrade to v8 and would like to ask the group if it would be best to make the move back to PDF and enable the latest compression/streaming features OR stick with XOD. We have several thousand XOD files and would have to re-upload all as streaming PDF but would do that if the results were worth it.

We are currently converting XOD back to PDF on Linux for users to download through webviewer so keeping them as pdf for the native downloader would be advantageous.

Our current install is stock except for page manipulation for users to print very large CAD drawings as tile 8.5 x 11 pages. Aside from read/print/save, no other user interaction is made available for this install.

Thanks for any pointers,
Jason

[system]

Hello, I’m Ron, an automated tech support bot

While you wait for one of our customer support representatives to get back to you, please check out some of these documentation pages:

Guides:

• Streaming XOD documents
• Streaming PDF Documents using JavaScript
• Optimize & reduce lib folder for WebViewer - Optimize via script
• Get & convert PDF coordinates using JavaScript - Converting between PDF and viewer coordinates

APIs:

• ForceClientSideInit
• UI - officeOptions
• Core.PartRetrievers. PartRetriever - setCustomHeaders(headers)

Forums:

• Loading new documents into Webviewer becomes progressively slower
• Loading XOD documents in the viewer
• Could not load type ‘APPortalUI.Web.HttpHandler.PdfHttpHandler’

[cmendoza]

Hello JasonD,

We have a guide that outlines a lot of the advantages of upgrading to WebViewer with PDFs here: How to Upgrade from Universal WebViewer to Client-Side WebViewer.

We also have a migration guide that explains the process here: PDFTron Systems Inc. | Documentation.

Hope these are able to help you in making your decision!

Best Regards,

Carlo Mendoza
Software Developer
PDFTron Systems, Inc.
www.pdftron.com

[JasonD]

Hi Carlo,

Thank you for the info and links.

Download speed was the reason why we went with XOD back in 2016. If we were to hypothetically benchmark downloading an XOD vs the optimized PDF method of a file that is the same size (ie 80mb), which would typically load faster and at the same/similar quality?

Is optimized pdf superior to a linearized pdf in terms of speed, document rendering quality being that it seems to be the newer method?

Thanks again,
Jason

[cmendoza]

Hello JasonD,

Comparing download speed between XOD and PDF can be a little difficult as the differences in speed could be situational. If you take conversion time of XOD into account then PDF would be faster since it wouldn’t have to be converted. Also, some documents are much faster and better quality in PDF rendering because they contain complex transparency, and typically we are able to get better rendering quality from PDFs as well. Overall, unless you’re using Internet Explorer 11, the advantages of PDF rendering make for an overall better product.

For optimized vs. linearized PDFs, every “viewer optimized PDF” is also linearized, the difference is that viewer optimized PDFs will embed prerendered thumbnails of the pages. These are used by Webviewer to quickly display on the page without having to wait for WebAssembly to load or process the page data. When WebAssembly is ready; however, the rendering would be normal.

Also one thing to note is that you could keep your existing XOD files and just view-optimize new PDFs. Reprocessing wouldn’t be necessary unless you want to use other PDF features like merging documents.

Best Regards,

Carlo Mendoza
Software Developer
PDFTron Systems, Inc.
www.pdftron.com