Feature Request: Allow to disable the online pdf viewer in Nextcloud Office

[xylo]

Describe the bug
Nextcloud Office is a great tool for working (collaboratively) online on writable documents.
Unfortunatly it breaks the simple download feature that Nextcloud provides for pdf files.

Without Nextcloud Office enabled Nextcloud allows users to download pdf files with a simple click on the pdf file. This is the most intuitive behaviour and the wanted behaviour in 99.999% of all cases.

Unfortunately when Nextcloud Office is enabled this simple download option gets replaced by a procedure which is

• time consuming (since Nextcloud Office takes ages to load large pdf files)
• unsafe (Nextcloud Office fails in certain cases, see Failing startup of Collabora prevents users from downloading documents even if the download option is activated #3332)
• resource intensive (consumes a lot of memory and CPU on the server side)
• unpleased (scrolling and search is complicated and takes a lot of time)
• functionless (the online pdf viewer missed a lot of features, e.g. it cannot play embedded videos or animations, ...)

Of cause there is the three dots menu where users can enforce the download. However, new or external users do typically not use this menu. That's why we need a useful default for the normal click operation or at least an configuration option to disable Nextcloud Office for certain file types.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Enable Nextcloud Office
2. Click on a pdf file in the files app.
3. See how Nextcloud Office starts and tries to open or open the pdf file in an online viewer.

Expected behavior
When a user clicks on a pdf file in the files app the pdf file should always be downloaded regardless of whether Nextcloud Office is enabled or not.

Client details:

• OS: Windows, Linux, MaxOS
• Browser: Chrome, Firefox
• Device: desktop

Server details

Nextcloud version:
29.0.10

Version of the richdocuments app
8.4.9

Version of Collabora Online
24.04.2.1 80a6f97

Configuration of the richdocuments app
Not needed here.

[juliusknorr]

Downloading a pdf should not be the default behaviour in Nextcloud, do you have the files_pdfviewer app disabled?

[xylo]

OK, now I remember that there was such an app which we had to disable many year ago. So maybe downloading pdfs is not the default behaviour in Nextcloud but it's the default behaviour for most other placed on the web and by disabling files_pdfviewer it can be at least fixed very easily. I wish there was a similar fix für Nextcloud Office without needing to disable Nextcloud Office.

[elzody]

Personally, I would always expect a PDF to open in the browser (which it should do by default). Even with Nextcloud Office enabled, I would not expect it to download the PDF by default -- I would download it explicitly if I really wanted to. If I am correct, what you are suggesting is rather a feature to allow a server-wide setting for this?

@juliusknorr Not sure if we really want to do that or if it would make sense.

[xylo]

@elzody You're right. Some web browsers today have an embedded pdf viewer (with limited capabilities, e.g. very slow search function). The good thing about this is that these embedded pdf viewers can be deactivated and a lot of people do that.

On the other hand, I've now had a look at how Google Drive does it. And Google Drive also opens pdf files in an online pdf viewer. :( So I'm probably wrong with my assumption regarding the "default behaviour" for pdf files.

Although I don't see any advantages in the online pdf viewer but many disadvantages, you might be right if you say it should be called a feature. Personally, I find those online pdf viewers just annoying. However, one learns to use the ...->download menu after some time. Somehow many of our (non-tech-savvy) users are somehow confused by the online pdf viewer. They ask us why the videos in the pdf are not playable, why the search function is so slow, or why the pdf cannot be viewed at all (see #3332). And we tell them that they do it wrong by clicking directly on the pdf file and that the have to use the ...->download option to make things work. So from our perspective it would be really really great if there was a configuration option for pdf files to avoid those pitfalls.

We already started to write a lot of apache RewriteRules (to the direct download link) to deal with this problem. However, this is a lot of manual work and could be avoided with a simple configuration option in Nextcloud Office. So we would be very glad if this feature could be added to Nextcloud Office.