Universal Viewer

Universal Viewer

Universal Viewer is an open-source software that allows users to view and interact with digital content in various formats. It supports viewing documents, images, 3D models, maps, ebooks, and more in a web browser.
Universal Viewer image
document viewer pdf images 3d maps ebooks

Universal Viewer: View and Interact with Digital Content

Open-source software to view and interact with various digital formats, including documents, images, 3D models, maps, ebooks.

What is Universal Viewer?

Universal Viewer is an open-source software developed by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) community that provides a unified way to view and interact with digital content in web applications. It supports viewing a wide range of file types including images, documents, ebooks, 3D models, maps, videos, and more without requiring any external plugins.

Some key features of Universal Viewer include:

  • Supports many file formats out of the box like PDF, JPEG2000, TIFF, PNG, SVG, JPEG, GIF etc.
  • Zoom and pan images/documents for close inspection
  • Rotate or flip images and 3D models
  • Adjust brightness and contrast of images
  • View pages side-by-side or as thumbnails
  • Search full text content
  • Annotate images with shapes, text comments etc.
  • Compatible with IIIF manifests and APIs
  • Customizable layouts and branding
  • Responsive design that works well on mobile and desktop
  • Accessibility support with keyboard shortcuts, screen reader support etc.
  • Available under GNU AGPL license

Universal Viewer can be easily integrated into existing systems and provides an interactive way for users to engage with digital content online. Its open architecture makes it possible to build custom extensions as per specific needs.

Universal Viewer Features

Features

  1. Supports over 150 file formats including images, documents, 3D models, maps, ebooks, etc.
  2. Allows zooming, panning, rotating, fullscreen mode for images and documents
  3. Annotations and markup tools for documents
  4. Text search within documents
  5. Tree view and thumbnail view for multi-page files
  6. Supports IIIF for interoperability with digital repositories
  7. Responsive design works across desktop, mobile and tablets
  8. Customizable UI and themes
  9. Accessibility support
  10. Internationalization - supports multiple languages
  11. APIs available for integration into other platforms

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Wide file format support

Intuitive controls for interacting with content

Extensive annotation and markup capabilities

Mobile and touch friendly interface

Highly customizable and extensible

Open source and free

Cons

Lacks some advanced features of paid viewers like redaction

Can be resource intensive for very large files

Formatting issues with some complex document types

Limited technical support compared to paid solutions


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