Our Document Editor feature lets you upload documents to annotate and edit in real-time; it also lets you upload or draw signatures for e-signing.

The whole session still takes place in one browser tab, making Surfly a start-to-sign solution.

Uploading a file into the session

You can do this by opening a New tab inside the session.

You can click on Upload files button and select the file from your computer

Or you can even drag a drop a file into this New tab popup

User Interface

Once your file has been uploaded you will see a Document Editor UI or Document Viewer UI, depending on your setting for option document_editor_enabled.

Below you can see the UI in default, editor mode and some commonly used buttons

For easy navigation when you have multiple page documents

Insert option can be used to add Signatures

Document editor menu in top-left corner

"PDF technology powered by PDFTron SDK copyright © PDFTron™ Systems Inc., 2001-2020, and distributed by Surfly BV under license. All rights reserved."

List of accepted file formats in PDFTRON

pdf, jpg, jpeg, png, docx, xlsx, pptx, doc, xls, ppt, vsd, vsdx, txt, rtf, odt, ods, odp, bmp, wmf, emf, gif

If the uploaded document is not a PDF, the document is first rendered as a PDF and then displayed.

Under the hood

When a local file is uploaded to the session, it is temporarily stored in the server cache for the duration of the session. Our Document Editor then renders the file from the cache for display purposes. If the uploaded document is not in PDF format, it is first converted to PDF before being displayed. Similar to a webpage, the DOM/Visual updates are shared with the following-participants.

Users can download currently displayed document as a PDF replica of the original. To download the original file in its original format (e.g. .docx), users must enable the allow_original_file_download option, which can be accessed via the chat button (see below) or a webhook document.shared.

Once the session ends, the original document is automatically removed from the server cache to protect user privacy.

Related session options

Option

Default

Description

filesharing_enabled

true

Allow file sharing and enable Document Editor feature. When set to false, the button will disappear from the control bar.

document_editor_enabled

true

Enable editing in the document viewer interface.

original_file_download_allowed

false

When enabled, users will be able to download shared files in their original format using the chat button (See below).

If disabled, users can download the current working document in PDF format, using the download button in the document editor menu.

This option may be useful in situations where preserving the original file format is important, such as when sharing media or design files.

download_trigger_enabled

true

When a user downloads a file in a Surfly session, offer to let others download the file. If set to false, downloaded files will not be available to other participants.

Download shared files in their original format using the chat button