Question

LF Web Client - Edit PDFs online like MS online - is it possible?

Web Client Laserfiche Cloud

Updated August 12

asked on July 21

Hello,

Our business is planning a future move to Laserfiche Cloud, and one challenge I've encountered is the limited ability to edit PDFs online. While the Laserfiche Web Client does offer some annotation features, it lacks key capabilities found in native PDF applications (without using forms/workflows) — such as signing, splitting, merging, and advanced editing.

I haven’t done extensive research yet, but I haven’t come across much information online addressing this gap.

Is this a common limitation others have faced? Or is there a PDF solution out there that integrates with Laserfiche and offers a similar experience to what Microsoft Office Online provides for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

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Replies

replied on August 6

Web Client (cloud and self-hosted) "Download and Check Out" editing feature is currently only available for for Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint document types. That said, we are working on a redesign of the "Download and Check Out" feature that should be able to support additional file types /desktop editors. Can't comment on specifics at this time but thanks for bringing the PDF use case up.

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replied on August 11

Thanks for the clarity on this Paolo, do you know if Laserfiche would consider partnering with a 3rd party company to make this possible like they have done in the past with docusign etc?

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replied on August 12

This is exciting news, thanks for sharing this update, Paolo! I'm looking forwards to seeing what's coming next with this.

If you want additional use cases for different file formats (or more scenarios for the PDF editing use case), I am happy to provide some too!

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replied on July 21

As far as I can tell, the native entry editing features of the web client do not allow editing PDFs at all (even though it may appear that way). You can move/copy pages between entries, but you are not actually editing the PDF. You are instead moving/copying TIFs of the pages that were generated.

That said, if you are viewing the file (not the pages), you may be able to edit the PDF using the Adobe Acrobat browser integration as mentioned here. I am using LF12 and it does not appear to work for me as shown in that post, so I'm not sure if that still works.

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replied on August 1

Hi Rob,

The majority of our customers that have moved to cloud use the desktop client (primarily due to the email restrictions), and open the PDF natively locally using a PDF editor such as Kofax PDF pro or adobe pro.

The ability to edit PDF's in the web client would indeed be a nice feature (and would certainly make a good feature request), but still wouldn't overcome this fundamental flaw around email handling in the web client, and therefore is somewhat a moot point.

Cheers!

Chris

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replied on August 1 • Show version history

Thanks for the heads up Chris, that is awkward... I will have a think, I know the guys are doing something clever in forms where they have the ability to see and respond to emails in outlook via forms, maybe embed that into the web client, would just need to work out how to pass the current email through.

I suppose if we get PDF's ticked off, that only leaves emails left then

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replied on July 22

Thanks Kevin, I've come across a few tools since submitting the post that have the potential to integrate with the web client in regards to editing PDF's online, I suppose I'm hoping someone has already achieved this to provide some guidance or comment on their experience.

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replied on July 31

I haven't been able to figure out a workaround for this either - things like reordering pages, splitting pages into new files, etc are all things you can do with the TIF file, but as Kevin noted above, that doesn't actually modify the corresponding PDF file (the "Electronic File").

I wish there was a better way to interact with the PDFs themselves - our engineering team is a particularly heavy user of layered PDFs, and the "TIF vs PDF" discussion has created a large barrier to adoption for them because downloading PDFs every time they want to modify a layer (or merge a PDF, or split a PDF) is a painstaking process.

If you do end up testing out any of those tools, I'd be very interested in learning how they work out for you - PDF functionality has been one of the largest pain points for our implementation by far.

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replied on August 1

I'll certainly post something on this chat if I find something!

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LF Web Client - Edit PDFs online like MS online - is it possible?

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