This section gives high-level guidelines to achieve fast end-user interaction with source documents that contain hundreds or even thousands of pages.

Use Viewing Packages to Pre-Convert Content Whenever Possible

The most important thing you can do to make large documents load quickly in the browser is to make sure the document content has already been converted for viewing in the browser before an end user starts to view it. This is especially true for Microsoft Office documents.

If you are using PrizmDoc Application Services (PAS), you can take advantage of our Viewing Packages feature to comprehensively pre-convert an entire document for fast viewing in the browser. Once created, a viewing package persists until you explicitly delete it, and it allows PAS to simply return static content for any page of a document, even if the document has thousands of pages.

If you are not yet taking advantage of PAS (that is, you are communicating directly to the back-end PrizmDoc Server to create your viewing sessions), consider adding PAS to your environment to take advantage of the Viewing Packages feature.

If you are not familiar with how the browser, your web tier, PAS, and the back-end PrizmDoc Server work together, refer to the PrizmDoc Overview.

Use Server-Side Search to View Large Documents

Ideally, the Viewer would perform a client-side search whenever possible and a server-side search whenever necessary. In reality, we make an educated guess based on page count. By default, our Viewer will perform a client-side search if a document contains no more than 80 pages; otherwise, the Viewer will offload the search work to the server. For many kinds of documents, this arbitrary 80-page threshold works fine. However, if you are using documents of 80 pages or fewer with a substantial amount of text, or if your end user's browser is particularly memory constrained, you may find that this default is not aggressive enough in offloading search work to the server.

When constructing a viewer control, you can use the ViewerControlOptions searchMethodPageCountThreshold property to adjust the maximum number of pages a document can have before the Viewer switches to server-side search. Additionally, you can use the searchMethodType property to force the Viewer to only use server-side search (or only use client-side search).

The Viewing Sessions serverSideSearch property determines whether server-side text searching will be available for a document and is the default value.