Forum Discussion
Tab Spacing in Text Web Part
Hi Tristan999 , thank you for your reply.
Thanks for clearing this up for me. We are performing a feasibility test to see if SharePoint is a viable option to host online versions of our Technical Manuals. These manuals make extensive use of tabbed data sets which we have historically provided to our users through PDF documents.
We intend to upload these PDF documents as well so that our users can download them as they are too large in file size to view conveniently online.
Is there another web part that is more suitible?
Problem:
You have large PDF documents which contain tabbed data sets that you want to upload to SharePoint and want to use document previews to prevent unnecessary download of files. You found that large PDF files could not be previewed through SharePoint during your proof-of-concept. So, you decided to investigate whether web parts can be used in place of the preview. You looked at the web parts and identified a potential solution using the Text Web Part. Unfortunately, the Text Web Part has limited formatting capabilities.
Additional questions for your consideration:
1. What is the biggest PDF File that you have today? Do you see a foreseeable size increase in the future?
2. In the scenario where you want to copy the contents of PDF files to the text web part. Are you copying the entire content of a PDF to the Text Web Part?
3. What happens in a scenario when there are updates to a technical manual? Were you planning to manually update the text web part each time technical manuals are updated?
Something you may want to look at:
https://helpx.adobe.com/ca/document-cloud/help/office365-configuring-sharepoint-onedrive.html
- Hi Tristan999, Historically, we put our documents together using Adobe InDesign, print out hard copies and export PDF versions for convenience. The documents are full of technical drawings and images, are approximately 700-1000 pages and can be as large as 250mb.
So for, the uploading and document management of PDFs in SharePoint are not causing an issue, it seems straight forward to store them and provide download links for the end user's convenience to view them off-line. But the problem is when trying to view them through a web part such as "File and Media'. It works, but unfortunately not good enough as far as I can work out.
It is possible that the size of our PDF files will increase over time although we do try to keep them as small as possible. eg, instead of using bitmap images, our house style is mainly vector graphic and we have a large team who create these drawings. These vector drawing play a big part in keeping overall file size to a minimum.
We do have a system for updates in place. As it stands, there would not be much if any difference in our processing time to update a web part instead of the original InDesign files and republishing them. Our version control is managed separate to the documents themselves (for better or worse).
Thank you for the adobe document cloud link, I have not considered or seen how this can be incorporated into SharePoint. I've started the process, but need to wait for admin to approve part of the process (likely Monday morning), I am only SharePoint Admin.Gotcha.
My question regarding file size is in regards to opening the document in the browser, i.e., the file may not open in the browser if its X size.
The Adobe Cloud allows you to open documents in the browser. For example, the preview option from the document library will not open but with the Adobe Cloud integration you will be able to open the document in the browser. Here is a 200 MB file that I opened directly from SharePoint, it is redirected to Adobe Cloud and the document can now be opened directly in the browser without having to download it:
Why is the "File and Media" web part not good enough? My assumption would be you just want to include your tabbed data sets and not images. If this is the case, why not create a text file and create a File and Media web part and link it to that document. Something like this (it even has the line numbers for each row data - IMO that's a bonus):
The caveat with this solution is that it allows you to enter text in the web part. However, it will not update the file.
- Tristan999
I've heard back from our IT and we don't have Adobe Document Cloud at this time, surprises me really as we seem to be subscribed to most of what Adobe offers. I will still be looking at this option though.
I'll take a look at this idea using Files and Media with a text file too.
I've been trialing Adobe RoboHelp as it has the function to integrate with SharePoint. Aside from the terrible name, RoboHelp is actually very good at taking our type of technical documents and formatting it with nav, glossary and search functions. I also believe you can use search from the SharePoint collection itself which is a really handy feature. It's funny though, as RoboHelp essentially generates html, css etc, it suffers the same Tab spacing issue.
I get the feeling that our team is going to have to reimagine how they format their data as part of our transition from desktop publishing to the online world. We should have been working on this a decade ago, but better late than never. 🙂