Advanced File Viewer: Features & Usage
🧰 Advanced File Viewer: Features & Usage
The Advanced File Viewer is an add-on in Ontraccr designed for viewing and interacting with large, complex documents — especially construction drawings and spec sheets. It supports advanced markup, full-screen viewing, OCR search, and a flexible annotation system.
🧾 What's Different from the Basic Viewer?
Compared to the Basic Viewer, the Advanced Viewer offers:
- Full OCR search (optical character recognition)
- A more advanced markup and annotation suite
- Commenting, status tracking, and threaded discussions
- Support for scroll modes, page layouts, and full-screen viewing
🖥 Viewing Options & Tools
When you open a file in the Advanced Viewer, you’ll find these features:
🔄 Navigation & Layout Controls
- Scroll mode: Choose between continuous scroll or page-by-page
- Page layout: Display in single page, double page, or cover-facing mode
- Rotate: Rotate documents clockwise or counterclockwise
- Full-screen mode: View drawings without distractions
🔍 Viewing Controls
- Zoom selector: Adjust magnification manually
- Pan tool: Click and drag to move across the document
- Select tool: Grab and interact with selectable content on the page
💡 Tip: These tools are optimized for reviewing large architectural drawings or spec sheets where precision and layout clarity are essential.
🔎 OCR Text Search
The Advanced Viewer includes optical character recognition (OCR), allowing you to search for specific words even in scanned documents.
Search features include:
- Case-sensitive and whole word match options
- A results list showing:
- All matching pages
- Highlighted words
- Direct links to jump to each result
📌 Use Case: Quickly find specific items or product specs in multi-page drawings without manually scanning every page.
💬 Commenting & Collaboration
The Advanced Viewer lets you add comments directly onto documents and manage them collaboratively.
How it works:
- Switch from View mode to Annotate mode
- Click the Note tool
- Drag to place your comment box and type your message
- Click Save
You can also:
- Reply to comments
- Attach files/photos to a comment
- Change the comment status (Accepted, Rejected, Completed, etc.)
- Filter comments by color, status, or type
- Search comments by keyword
🧠 This makes it ideal for team collaboration, especially on estimate reviews or drawing revisions.
✏️ Markup Tools
The Advanced Viewer includes a full suite of markup options, including:
- Highlight: Standard or freehand highlighting
- Underline: Standard or squiggly lines
- Strikethrough
- Insert / Replace text (replace feature is non-functional at this time)
- Free text: Add customizable text boxes
- Freehand draw: Use a pencil-like tool to sketch
- Rectangle tool: Draw boxes with customizable borders and fill
- Undo / Redo changes
- Eraser tool: Remove any annotations you’ve drawn
📌 You can style most elements with color, font, thickness, fill, and opacity controls.
💾 Saving = New Version
Anytime you save your annotations or comments, Ontraccr creates a new version of the document.
You’ll always be able to access and download:
- The latest version
- Any previous versions
📱 Available on All Platforms
The full Advanced Viewer functionality is available on:
- Web app
- Tablet
- Mobile app
✔ You get the same powerful tools on every device.
🧾 Summary
- The Advanced Viewer is perfect for large, detailed documents
- Offers OCR text search, full markup tools, and collaborative commenting
- All changes are versioned — keeping a full history
- Available on desktop, tablet, and mobile
- A must-have for teams working with drawings, specs, and revision-heavy files