It works! Gradients and all! Only problem is the same one as with PDFs, there is always a nasty band over gradients as if it lacks color gamut. NB I'm using the 'View' option in gmail to test drive it.
Great, yet more formats that I have to try and get around Google Docs with. Worst of all is PDF: Some of us have browsers and platforms that don't hate the format, and viewing PDFs natively in Safari/Chrome is a million times better than sending them through Google Docs for mangling.
It's a shame it's so chatty. Unless you're using it as a simple IFrame embed, it will fall over on xss errors.
In Twiddla, for example, we'd like to include a bit of custom script to detect when you click the "next page" button so that we can keep everybody synced up. That means we have to proxy it through our server and mess with the markup a bit. That's easy to do in Scribd's viewer, and it actually worked fine in Gdocs' view before October last year.
I was also curious about how they handle SVG. I was hoping I'd be able to edit it as a vector drawing. Nope. It gets rendered to a bitmap, by all upload methods I tried.
I found a couple people surprised by this in another context, so I'll include it here: while nice and featureful, Google Docs requires viewers to be logged into Google. This is a problem for some curmudgeons like myself, so if at all possible, try to have at least some alternate means of providing the data.
Yeah, it looks like documents can be viewed publicly (without a Google account) if going through the Viewer: http://docs.google.com/viewer
Pretty handy if you have a bunch of files in their original formats available for downloading, but want to have links available for easy online viewing.
They probably haven't set up the sharing properly.
If you share a document, in the "Permissions" box the top item lets you change how visible a document is, and there's also an "allow anyone to edit" checkbox so you can even edit without signing in.
I think you can enable support for more products in the Google Apps management page. I have access to pretty much all Google products in my GApps account
You can still test it out by using the viewer to open files on the web, without having to log in; this can be pretty useful in its own right. Here's a bookmarklet that opens the link you click immediately afterwards in Docs Viewer:
I have just tried to open a word file and it was impossible since Google Docs support Word files only up to 1MB! This is a big limitation in case that somebody would like to co-edit scientific articles.
DXF and DWG import requires Sketchup Pro in the current version. Older versions of Sketchup at least up to 7 supported DXF/DWG (that's why I still have them installed).
The Illustrator and Photoshop formats are what caught my eye.
What happens if you try to view an Illustrator file in Google Docs Viewer?
Does it render the file just as Illustrator would?
Since Google Docs offers the ability to export to PDF, it would be impressive if you could open an Illustrator file in Google Docs and export it to PDF format without the need to own a copy of Illustrator.
