FlowPaper

We use Flowpaper to protect sensitive documents from being copied, while sharing with intended users

Comments: Secure document viewing for end users.
Protecting a very large online library for theft.
Very favorable pricing for what this software accomplishes.

Pros:

It is a flexible piece of software. It can be used as a publishing tool to share PDF documents with optional printing, downloading, and full search indexing. It can also be used in a more restrictive way since the viewer can be customized with only the tools you need. We use this as the secure viewer for an online document library. By customizing the viewer we restrict printing and download access and force the documents to be rendered using streaming files. This prevents the documents from arriving on end user hard drives in any usable format, but allows the documents to be viewed in the browser window with 100% fidelity. This is a custom scenario, but several years ago this was the only secure viewer we could find that didn't break the bank.

Cons:

There is a steep learning curve and a lot of post purchase programming and customization to make this work. Flowpaper provides some working examples to base your environment on, but it is still a lot of custom programming to integrate.

The best way to convert PDFs to HTML5

Comments: The Flowpaper licence is quite expensive for just one website domain. The site I publish on owns three domains all pointing to the same website. Because the user could be coming in from any domain, I am not 100% sure that everyone who visits the site can actually have access to the magazine. Luckily they are generous with the free version that allows for smaller documents, as I could not afford this for ALL my clients who want visual PDFs shown online.

Pros:

The final result of the conversion is suburb. The pro version has all the extras like links, shares, zoom. The quality of the pages was excellent but the pages still opened immediately. I was worried when I saw the final zipped file size, but it was really fast to load. The publication I publish is high quality, and I expected the online version to be useful but not perhaps at the same level. The book is displayed just like the actual magazine, and it offers the PDF for download for clients to print out. I found it easy to load my own branding and colours. You can save your document as a template, making it quicker to do future issues with consistency.

Cons:

The most irritating problem might have been short term and has now been solved - every time I opened the software I had to enter my license number. Eventually I kept the license number in a text file on my desktop. I also found that although I had a template, it did not remember several items of my personal branding - my logo etc. I had to remember to enter these every time. The branding is a pro feature, and perhaps it wasn't included on the saved versions by mistake. I also found the branding a bit limiting - just one size logo. After publishing, I added my own CSS to improve some things. When I tried to use the version that reflows text on pages for cell phones (it was a document with a lot of text), I couldn't get it to work smoothly. Perhaps it was the fault of the PDF.

Bad software that renews subscriptions without consent

Pros:

The concept of the product is good and has a lot of possibilities

Cons:

We were unhappy about the product, because of the constant crashes that remove all progress in the project. No possibility to save it on the go. Now here comes the worst part. They automatically renewed our subscription while literally saying "Your subscription will not automatically renew" on the user profile dashboard!

Support not present

Comments: Amazed by the performance, disappointed about lack of some options (cannot start up with pages thumbnails already open on left side) and very disappointed about the support just ignoring me.

Pros:

The speed. The speed that huge catalogues are opened and searched or browsed through is unearthly. It is by far the fastest system there is. Compared to next best (Real3D flipbook) it is like a terminator next to a 3yr old, when you look performance, quality and speed only.

Cons:

The lack of support. I really need deeplinking to work and I rely on their Wordpress plugin. This could be THE best pdf (free!!) plugin for those, who don't need large or much publications. Except that the deeplinking is not working if you embed it in Wordpress page with Wordpress plugin. And that defeats the whole purpose of catalogue marketing, if you cannot send your cusotmer a link with correct page open. The support promised to fix the plugin in a week and did not communicate anymore, while I annoyingly, but politely asked about the progress every week. Now it has been a month already, an update came out for the Flowpaper application, but none for the plugin.

Great tool to show PDF files online

Comments: We have been FlowPaper to put online our company's monthly catalog alongside other documents, and so far we have been happy with the results. It may not be the best solution out there, but still made our work a lot easier. I do recommend to use a cheaper alternative if you are planning to publish once in a while though,.

Pros:

FlowPaper does a great work at publishing PDF files for online reading, offering several output and customization options. It is easy to work with as well, allowing to use your own branding and design. You can also save your current document as a template, however it is not perfect and requires some checking before publishing. While I highly recommend to flatten the document before importing the file, it does a nice job compressing the file and uses images instead of pdf pages in slow connections. It can glitch graphics in heavily edited files, so for these I recommend using a tool like SmallPDF for example.

Cons:

Despite of being mobile friendly, I found that it usually lags in several devices and the interface often lacks buttons because of the lack of space. The translations available for the reading UI are terrible, even if compared to Google Translate. Luckily it is an easy fix, but it requires to copy a locale folder each time you publish a document. I also dislike that they show templates not available on the purchased licence and doesn't offer the option to hide it (we have a Zine licence for a single website). It is also worth mention you lose access to updates after one year (they call it "upgrades" which may lead to confusion to some consumers, as it could mean newer versions rather than random updates).