Until today, a PDF had no place in Heart Photos. Now it does. A PDF goes into your library the way a photograph does, sits in your galleries beside your images, and opens in a viewer made for reading documents. Here is what you can do with one, and where to find each thing.
Add a PDF to your library
Drop a PDF onto your wall in Heart Photos, or press Upload in a gallery and choose one, just as you would a photograph. Its tile shows the first page, with PDF and its page count in the corner, so you can tell it from an image at a glance. Galleries, tags, who may see it and the Trash all work for a PDF exactly as they do for a photo.
Read and search it
Open the tile and the PDF takes the place of the photo. The pages run down the screen at the width of the window, the way Google Drive opens a document. Use + and - to zoom (or hold Ctrl and turn the wheel, or pinch on a phone), or press 0 to fit the width again. The arrow keys and Page Up and Page Down move between pages, and Home and End jump to the first and last.
Press Ctrl+F, or the search button, and type a word. Heart Photos reads every page and tells you how many times it found it ("3 of 25", say), marks each match on the page, and takes you from one to the next with Enter (Shift+Enter goes back). Esc closes the search.
Copy text, or an image
The words on each page are real text, so you can drag across a sentence and press Ctrl+C to copy it, as on any web page. The images inside a PDF can be picked out too: press one and a small bar offers Copy (the image on your clipboard), Save (the image goes into your Heart Photos library, in the gallery you are in) and Download.
Edit it
Press Edit and a bar of tools opens over the pages:
- Text: press where it goes, type, then press elsewhere.
- Highlight and Draw: drag over the words, or drag a line, in the color and size you choose.
- Image: press where it goes, then drag it into place and size it by its corner.
- Turn a page a quarter turn, delete it, or move it up or down.
- Merge adds another PDF after the page you are on, and Split takes pages out as a PDF of their own ("1-3, 5", say).
Every change can be taken back with Undo (or Ctrl+Z). Two things to know: text you add uses a standard font that covers Latin letters only, and the words a PDF already carries are not retyped in place; a text box laid over them covers them instead.
When you are happy, Save files your edited copy as a new PDF beside the original, named as an edit of it, so the original is never changed. Saving needs you signed in; Download works for anyone.
In He.art's Docs too
Paste a link to a PDF on Heart Photos into a He.art doc and the PDF itself appears in the doc, ready to read and search. If you would rather keep the plain link, press Show as link.
How it is made
The viewer draws pages with pdf.js, Mozilla's PDF library, and the editor rewrites the file in your browser with pdf-lib. Both are served from Heart Photos itself rather than from an outside site, and the edits are made on your own computer before anything is saved.
Try it
Open Heart Photos, sign in, and drop in a PDF you have been meaning to read. Search it, copy the line you need, highlight what matters, and save your marked-up copy beside the original. And if you are new here, He.art is where the same account asks questions, writes docs and makes images.