k3davis

The viewer appearance (including toolbar) can be changed almost entirely by using the Custom CSS File option with the Enhanced Viewer. Depending on the color you choose, you may also have to change the color of the sprite images (toolbar buttons) to remain legible.

An example is provided with the plugin with the “dark theme” and dark.css file. If you need more specific help, please get in touch with me via the Support tab in GDE Settings.

timbo,

Thanks for looking around to try to find your answer before posting… Glad to help but that action helps me, too.

I’ve received a number of reports for this issue over the last couple of months. While I can’t tell you exactly where the breakdown is occurring (just “somewhere on or between Google’s server and yours”) it seems this is usually caused by very slow response from your server – either because it’s located on the other end of the world with a narrow pipe, or you’re on a shared host that’s overburdened, etc. I haven’t seen this crop up with regard to Google accounts, though it might happen more often with larger files it certainly can happen even with small ones.

I typically recommend (if you can do it) that you host any problem files on a high speed, US-based server if you encounter this problem on your site. Dropbox has worked very well for people who experienced similar issues.

This is not ideal by any means but is related to network connectivity in a way that I as the plugin developer can’t currently improve. Sorry for this inconvenience.

Kevin

ekarta,

This looks like a bug in Google Viewer, but I think more accurately it’s a problem with the formatting of the original document that is confusing Google Viewer. When I download the original document the first page shows up correctly in Russian (I assume, at least the characters are Cyrillic), but the second page has overlaps and very strange formatting that may well be a different language (?).

You might want to test this theory by creating a simple document with Russian text and trying to embed it. If it works properly, it would more or less confirm that there is some weird formatting in this document that is confusing the viewer about what character set to use.

FWIW when I look at the document in pdf.js (the built in PDF viewer in Firefox) the first page is Russian and the second page is a strange mess.

Kevin

Hi sank,

Sorry, I may not have understood you entirely the first time. If you want to link to the full screen viewer, then following the directions in the link you provided should work. The image tag I left was simply for a thumbnail of a page. If you wrap that in a link as described in your first post then you should end up with a clickable image of the first page (or whatever page you choose) that goes to the full screen viewer. Here is a complete example using the first page of the first document on the link you provided:

<a href="http://davestringer.com/__wp/wp-content/plugins/google-document-embedder/view.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdavestringer.com%2F__wp%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F08%2FJapa-Reviews.pdf&hl=&gpid=1&chrome=true"><img src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https://davestringer.com/__wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Japa-Reviews.pdf&a=bi&pagenumber=1"></a>

I think the problem with the “unsupported browser” message may be related to other items being inserted into the viewer, presumably by other plugins. When I view the source of the viewer on your site there is code at the bottom that isn’t coming from either GDE or Google, but it appears “photocrati” and “lbg-audio1-html5” and perhaps others. There are multiple jquery references at the bottom of the page as well, and those aren’t coming from GDE or Google either, but probably another plugin (maybe one of those I’ve already listed). The inclusion of this junk code is resulting in javascript errors in the browser, however if you only want to hide that message you can add a line to your style sheet you’re using for GDE.

.docs-butterbar-container { display: none; }

There may be other issues with leaving that code in there, though. Those plugins appear to be “leaky” as they are adding code to pages they do not own.

sank,

That error message comes from Google, whom you would presume would be smart enough to recognize their own browser… I’m wondering if you might have any plugin or extension installed that might be altering your user agent string. I sometimes use one while testing my sites. Otherwise if you could provide a link as an example maybe I can give more direction. Certainly that isn’t normal behavior and I’ve not seen it elsewhere or heard similar reports from others.

As to thumbnails, I had planned to offer just that very feature in the next major version of GDE. I have been discouraged by this because of the relative instability of Google’s viewer. I spend so much time working through quirks and maintenance such as this that I fear new development will be fragile and will require a lot more time to support. Google may eventually choose to end this service altogether, though I hope not, they certainly have a history of abandoning announced and heavily used product offerings.

In the meantime you can provide this yourself with a little bit of “grunt work” – rather than create a manual link to GDE as you linked above, create an image tag linking to the viewer directly like so:

<img src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://mysite/mydoc.pdf?a=bi&pagenumber=1" height=XX width=XX>

where obviously you replace the bogus document link with your own, set real height and width values, and you can set the pagenumber value to whatever page you want to show a thumbnail of. The other parameters must remain intact.

Hope this helps.

Kevin

Yes, with some limitations. That is a standard option in the enhanced viewer. See this page and look under “security.”

http://www.davistribe.org/gde/settings/enhanced-options/

I have a Nexus 7 and it works normally there. If you’re having problems with a specific document, please give more details. Thanks!

Nico, a Google code change has broken the page attribute. I am trying to find an alternate way to implement this feature. At the moment this is not supported. 🙁

At the moment it looks like I can implement a fix for this but it will require use of the enhanced viewer – the attribute will no longer be supported in the standard viewer. I really don’t like this so I’m still trying to find another solution.