Should documents be viewable before processing finishes?

[eyeseast]

With PDF.js, we'll be able to view a document as soon as it's uploaded. This raises some questions:

• I'm not sure if that has privacy implications (since the original file is in private storage until it's done processing and marked public).
• I also don't know what other parts of the UI will depend on full processing.
• If there's an error in processing, we might need to nudge people to reprocess.

[eyeseast]

Assets we might not have when the document is viewable:

• images
• page spec

What else?

We can actually generate thumbnails and page sizes directly from the PDF if needed.

[allanlasser]

My pitch would be a minimally-useful viewer while the document is in a processing state. Disabling options and links, such as:

• thumbnails and notes views
• annotations

An enhancement would be using native browser notifications to let people know when a document or upload finishes processing.

[eyeseast]

Thinking about this more, the parts we're not likely to have are mostly on S3: page images, text, text positions. I agree on making the document read-only until it's done processing. We can probably render notes if a document has them and is reprocessing.

I guess one question is whether there will be a point where we don't have a PDF file, and what to show in that state.