Sync documents?

[gordol]

I'm back using an Android device after about a five year absence, my last one was a Droid X running 2.3 (Gingerbread). I now have an Acer Iconia One 10 with 7.0. Note: My phone is iOS (depending on how this tablet goes and iPhone pricing on my next upgrade I may switch back fully).

My current thing is syncing documents. Sync, not merely copying back and forth.

My desktop (and laptop) Windows machines are set to sync documents with OneDrive by default. I want to be able to synchronize a subset of that folder tree to my new tablet, primarily PDFs, so that new files will transfer automatically back and forth. Most such changes will originate on the desktop, but some markups will be done on the tablet.

iOS has apps by Readdle that do this. Setup the cloud accounts in the app, select the folder or folders to sync, and off you go. The files sync back and forth when the app is opened and there is a network connection.

How can I do this on Android?

 

[ManiacJoe]

Does OneDrive on Android not give you the option of syncing only some of the folders?

 

[gordol]

Does OneDrive on Android not give you the option of syncing only some of the folders?

Technically, yes (I just found the unobvious way of doing this), but it's sandboxed. For example, Foxit scans the fileystem for supported files, and it's not seeing these. And the PDF viewer in OneDrive leaves a lot of functionality behind. Lack of ability to jump to a page, lack of support of table of contents, lack of support of internal bookmarks. Lack of ability to mark up the files.

 

[ManiacJoe]

You should be able to flag the folder as "keep off line" so that saved files remain on the phone. Then your normal PDF viewer should work as expected.

 

[chanchan05]

If you have another PDF app in your phone, once you open the file in OneDrive's PDF viewer, tap the 3 dots on the upper right and select 'open in another app'. It would also ask you if you want the app to be used for pdf files always. Just select that and you won't have to deal with the OneDrive viewer. Personally I use Xodo for most of my PDF viewing/editing. The Android version of Foxit is just bad.

 

[gordol]

You should be able to flag the folder as "keep off line" so that saved files remain on the phone. Then your normal PDF viewer should work as expected.

Found it, it was so not obvious. Now, they files are available offline, but only within the OneDrive app. I have scoured the device file system with the file browsers in Foxit, MobiOffice and Polaris and none of them are showing OneDrive's local storage. It's apparently sandboxed.

OneDrive's PDF handling is almost complete, fillable forms work, and it has annotation tools. It does not seem to support tables of content, indexes nor document-internal links. But it'll do