Read saved PDFs and documents
Save a link to a PDF and Bredbox keeps the document itself. Open it and you get the real pages: images, tables, figures, and layout exactly as published, not a text-only approximation.
Word documents and presentations get the same treatment. See Word documents and presentations for the formats Bredbox handles and what’s different about them.
Open a PDF
Section titled “Open a PDF”Click a saved PDF anywhere in your library, or find them all under Documents in the sidebar (G O). The first page appears right away; the rest load as you scroll, so a long report opens as quickly as a short one.
Move around
Section titled “Move around”- Scroll through the pages as you would any document. Nothing sits between the toolbar and the document, so the page has the window to itself.
- Open PDF options (the
...button at the right end of the toolbar) for everything else. - It shows which page you are on and how many there are. Type a page number and press Go to jump straight there.
- Zoom in and out with the
−and+buttons, or type a percentage straight into the box between them. Fit returns the page to the width of the window. Pages stay sharp at any zoom, and the panel stays open while you adjust.
The keyboard works too: + zooms in, - zooms out, and = fits the page to the window.
Bredbox remembers the zoom you chose and opens your next PDF at it, on this device. Choose Fit and every PDF opens fitted to whatever window you are in, however wide it happens to be.
Bredbox remembers where you stopped. Reopen the document later and you come back to the same page, and your library shows how far through you are.
Highlight a passage
Section titled “Highlight a passage”Select text on the page and choose Highlight, the same as in an article. You can attach a comment to any highlight, and everything you highlight shows up under Highlights in the sidebar.
A passage with a comment on it gets a small speech-bubble mark at the end. Hover the passage or the mark to read the comment (it opens just below the line, so the text it is about stays visible) and edit or remove it from there.
Highlighting needs text Bredbox can select. A scanned PDF (a document that is really photographs of pages) still displays perfectly, but there is no text underneath to select, so highlighting is unavailable on it.
Search inside your PDFs
Section titled “Search inside your PDFs”Bredbox reads the text of your PDFs so library search can find them by a phrase or an idea from the body, not just the title. Scanned PDFs are the exception again: with no readable text, they are found by their title, tags, and notes.
Keep the original
Section titled “Keep the original”Print (or P) opens your browser’s print sheet on the document’s own pages, so what comes out matches the file the publisher served. And if you print to PDF, the text in the saved copy is still selectable and searchable. Page ranges, scaling, and double-sided all live in that sheet, as they do for anything else you print.
Download in the toolbar gives you Original PDF: the exact file Bredbox saved. It is also what appears in a full data export, so the real documents come with you.
Word documents and presentations
Section titled “Word documents and presentations”Bredbox opens these formats in the same viewer as a PDF:
| Kind | Formats |
|---|---|
| Word processing | .docx, .doc, .odt, .rtf |
| Presentations | .pptx, .ppt, .odp |
When you save one, Bredbox turns it into a PDF once and shows you that, so a Word file or a slide deck opens with its real layout even if you don’t have Word or PowerPoint installed. Everything above works the same way: scrolling, page numbers, zoom, highlights and comments, search, reading progress, and printing. They are listed under Documents alongside your PDFs.
Download offers two files:
- Original DOCX (or
PPTX,ODT, and so on): the exact file you saved, ready to open and edit in the app it came from. This is also what a full data export includes. - PDF: the converted copy the viewer shows. Its page numbers match where your highlights sit, so it’s the one to keep alongside your notes.
A few differences from PDFs:
- Spreadsheets aren’t supported.
.xlsx,.xls, and.odsfiles are saved as ordinary links, because a wide sheet breaks into scattered pages that are hard to read. - The limit is 25 MB, rather than 50 MB for a PDF.
- Documents saved before Bredbox supported them stay as ordinary links that open the source in a new tab.
- Pages may not break exactly where they do in Word or PowerPoint. Fonts and layout can differ slightly from the app the document was written in. The text and the order of everything in it are the same.
When a document opens externally instead
Section titled “When a document opens externally instead”Some documents cannot be brought in, and those saves behave the way any plain link does: clicking one opens the source in a new tab. That happens when the file is password-protected, too large (50 MB for a PDF, 25 MB for a Word document or presentation), damaged, or no longer downloadable at its address.