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May 23, 2007

Preview Documents with Docufarm

Docufarm is a Firefox extension that lets you preview online documents. Everytime you click on a link to a PDF, PostScript file, Word document or PowerPoint presentation, the file is quickly downloaded on Docufarm's servers and you can see an almost instant preview of the file. Unlike what you see from Google's cache, Docufarm preserves the original formatting of the document and shows the images included in the document. While the file is searchable, the Docufarm interface only shows images for each page of the document, so you can't copy text.

This extension is useful for a quick overview of a document because the interface doesn't make reading the document an easy job (except for the PowerPoint presentations that look very nice in the slide view).

Docufarm also lets you search for supported documents available online and the results seem to be provided by Google.


{ Thank you, Laurent. }

6 comments:

  1. Its nice to know this extension availble in firefox

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  2. Better if optional. Clicked on a link that happened to be a PDF and it Docufarmed me. Would prefer to be able to right-click and have Docufarm as a option...

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  3. I think Google should buy this puppy. This could be integrated into Google documents by simply adding an 'edit' feature so that previewed documents could be edited.

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  4. Thanks for the review.
    Tip: click thumbnail images to view high-resolution versions and read them.
    I'll see if we can give the option of opening on Docufarm with a right-click instead of automatically redirecting...

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  5. I love it - but it's not working for me as Gmail attachments, which is how I plan to use it primarily. Is that because it doesn't use a link with pdf at the end?

    What to do??

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  6. It doesn't work with Gmail for two reasons:

    1. Gmail's attachments don't have extensions.

    2. Gmail's attachments aren't public. Docufarm works only with online documents available to everyone.

    From DocuFarm's blog:

    << The extension does not upload the documents to our servers.
    It simply prefixes the URL of documents with
    http://www.docufarm.com/view.jsp?url=DOCUMENT_URL

    It means that docufarm will only be able to show you documents that are publicly available. It won't show you documents that are on your machine or your intranet.

    For that, we're working on a server version that organizations can install.

    We're also working on giving people the option to upload local documents. Finally, we're actively engaging web-based email companies so that they can embed our technology in their email offerings. Wouldn't it be great if you could preview your attachments? Come on: HTML-based rendering doesn't do justice to these nice graphic-heavy PDF, PPT and PPS files. >>

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