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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.

  • 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

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.

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.

Phones default to a single page at a time rather than a two-page spread, which keeps the type readable without zooming. You can set this per client or per document — see Client workspaces.

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
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.

  • 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

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
  • Links inside the PDF are not clickable — pages are rendered as images, so a URL in your document is visible but not tappable. Worth keeping in mind when a brochure ends with a call to action
  • 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

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