Is there a way to preview PDFs on my board similar to how images work?

[Darren johnson]

I constantly work with PDF files and switching that to a jpeg/png ends up being tedious for each job. Any way I can upload a pdf and have it preview the first page?

[Iain Dooley]

@Darren johnson The Google drive power up sort of does this, if you have a PDF file linked from the card or a directory containing pdf files, you'll see a thumbnail of the PDF but it's small, so depending on how identifiable those PDFs are, you'll still have to click on each on to see it.

What do you need to do with the PDFs? ie. what's the goal of being able to preview them?

[Darren johnson]

The goal is to quickly identify jobs. I can do it with jpegs or pngs and it makes it easier, but it's not a huge deal. It's a little too tedius to export all my illustrator files as jpegs rather than PDFs as well. Adds more than twice the work saving my files.

Thanks!

[Iain Dooley]

@Darren johnson so from what you're saying it sounds like you have some sort of work order that comes in a PDF, you put that work order on a card and you want to be able to get some data about that job from the PDF without having to download the document each time right?

Google Drive has a pretty good built-in OCR that will extract text from a PDF that can be automated with Google Apps Script. So for example this function pdfToText in Google Apps Script will grab the information from a PDF document and return it as text:

https://gist.github.com/mogsdad/e6795e438615d252584f

From there, the information could be added to the card description. This would be relatively trivial using Trellinator:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/Introducing-Trellinator-Automate-Trello-with-Google-Apps-Script/ba-p/925271

If the information were consistently formatted, then you'd be able to get it to parse into neatly formatted job information like job number, client name etc., otherwise the text that comes into the description might be a little messy because the OCR function just scrapes the text out and doesn't preserve any formatting

[Darren johnson]

Nope, not looking to parse information, at least not text. I do pre-press print work. All of my text is in outline form anyways. It's usually posters and signage.

See attachment: Sample 1 has a jpeg, Sample 2 has a pdf. I want it to look like sample 1 without exporting my file as a jpeg and uploading that.