Our latest product release went live on July 23rd and includes improvements to how we render PDF content.
New PDF rendering engine for all browsers and devices
Last month Google made an update to its Chrome browser which was found to occasionally cause issues with rendering PDFs in iFrames. This is how the PathFactory platform displays PDFs, so as a result on June 25th we temporarily converted how all PDFs were displayed from using Chrome’s PDF renderer to images.
In this week’s release we’ve permanently solved the problem by adding a native PDF rendering capability to the PathFactory platform. This means whenever a visitor views a PDF asset within a Content Track, it’s now rendered by PathFactory as a live PDF. These changes also gave us the opportunity to improve how PDFs are displayed.
- All PDFs will now always render as live PDF files regardless of browser or device.
- Previously, when the starting page of a PDF was set to any page other than the first, PathFactory would convert the PDF into images. Now a live PDF is rendered regardless of which starting page is set.
- Now when a visitor returns to a PDF they have previously viewed, they’ll automatically be taken to the exact position they last viewed.
- We’ve removed the “Refresh Content” button from PDF content assets in the Content Library. This button functioned to update/generate the image version of PDF assets. Now that we don’t ever render PDFs as images, there’s no need to refresh content. The current PDF file is always displayed.
That’s it for this week – as always, please email support@pathfactory.com for assistance.