What readers can do

This page describes what the person opening your document sees. It’s worth knowing, because several of these are the reason a Living Page is easier to read than the PDF it came from.

Getting around

• Page turns with a click on either edge, or the on-screen arrows
• Thumbnails — a strip of every page, to jump straight to one
• Zoom from 1× to 3×, by button or by clicking the page. When zoomed in, dragging pans around
• Fullscreen

Search

Readers can search the full text of the document and get results page by page, with a snippet of the surrounding words. Selecting a result jumps to that page.

This works because every page’s text is extracted when the document is rendered. On scanned documents — where the pages are images with no text layer — OCR fills the gap on Solo and above.

Transcript

A panel showing the document’s text as continuous prose, page by page. Selecting any part of it jumps to that page.

It’s useful for reading on a phone, and it’s what makes the content readable by screen readers rather than being a wall of images.

Page layout

Documents open as a two-page spread when there’s room and drop to a single page as the screen narrows — so a phone shows one readable page rather than two tiny ones. This is the Auto setting, and it adapts to the document’s shape: a wide landscape or square document needs more room to show a spread than a tall portrait one, so it switches to a single page sooner.

You can override it per document or per client — force Single (always one page) or Spread (always two, even on a phone) — from the document’s or client’s settings. See Client workspaces.

Presenting

Any document can be shown as a full-screen presentation, with a laser pointer, highlights and a blackout key. See Presenting (pitch mode), or just press P in the reader.

Keyboard

The reader is fully keyboard operable:

Key	Does
← →	Previous / next page (pans when zoomed in)
↑ ↓	Pan, when zoomed in
Space	Next page
Home / End	First / last page
+ / -	Zoom in / out
z	Toggle zoom mode
f	Toggle fullscreen
p	Enter pitch mode (presenting)
Esc	Close a panel, exit zoom, exit fullscreen

The arrow keys, Home, End and Esc work anywhere on the page. The single-letter shortcuts need the reader itself to be focused, so they don’t fire while someone is typing in a search box.

Accessibility

• Reduced motion — a reader whose system asks for reduced motion gets a plain scrolling view instead of the page-flip animation, rather than just a faster flip
• Screen readers get the page text, not just images
• High-contrast modes are respected
• Every control has a proper label, and focus is managed when panels open and close

What the reader can’t do

So you’re not caught out:

• No downloading the PDF. Readers get rendered images; the original file is only downloadable by you, from your dashboard
• No printing
• A plain URL typed in the PDF isn’t automatically tappable — pages are rendered as images. But you can make any area of a page clickable, and real hyperlinks already in your PDF are detected and turned into links automatically, on any paid plan — see Links and video overlays
• No deep link to a specific page — a share link always opens at page 1
• No pinch-to-zoom on touch devices; use the zoom controls

Next

Embed on your website — the same reader, inside your own pages.