Reading PDF documents
Most signed containers hold a PDF. In ASiCE Viewer the pages are drawn one below another, and only the pages near the visible area are rendered, so a long document opens quickly. Use the plus and minus buttons to zoom between 50% and 300%; each zoom level is re-rendered at full sharpness rather than stretched.
A password-protected PDF cannot be previewed. The reader says so and offers the download button, so you can open the file in a PDF program with the password.
Reading Word and Excel files
- DOCX documents are laid out page by page with their fonts, tables and images.
- XLSX, XLS and ODS workbooks are shown as tables with a tab per sheet. Very long sheets are limited to the first 2,000 rows for speed.
- ODT and PPTX are shown as text only, which is enough to read the content.
Letters that turn into question marks
Text files do not declare their encoding. A file written years ago on an Estonian Windows machine may use the windows-1257 code page, in which õ and š are stored differently from today's UTF-8. A reader that guesses wrong shows õ or ?.
ASiCE Viewer tries UTF-8 first, then the Baltic and Western European code pages, and shows which encoding it used under the text.
Reading on a small screen
On a phone the file list and signatures appear first and the document below. Tapping a file scrolls to its preview. For regular reading on Android the app adds pinch-to-zoom that re-renders the page at the screen's resolution, and a text mode for selecting and copying.
When a document cannot be displayed
Some formats have no browser renderer, for example old .doc files or CAD drawings. The reader then shows the beginning of the file in hexadecimal and lets you download it for the program that understands it. Nothing is lost; the file is simply handed over. For the list of documents typically found in containers, see ASiC-E document viewer.
Frequently asked questions
Can I copy text from a document in the reader?
Text, Word and spreadsheet previews allow selecting and copying. PDF pages are drawn as images in the web reader; download the PDF to copy text from it.
Is there a file size limit?
No fixed limit. Very large containers are bounded by your device's memory; files of tens of megabytes open comfortably on a typical computer.