For heavy whiteboard users: what whiteboard to you use for meetings? (And how's that going?)

[barncro]

I'm new to Zoom, and have recently learned that Zoom's built-in whiteboard won't work with the multi-page PDFs I use while teaching (support has confirmed this limitation).  So I try the Miro and Mural integrations, but those don't allow for proper touchpad controls (zooming in/out, specifically), making them too inconvenient for my clients.

It's all adding up to a deal-breaker for me.  Has anyone out there found ways around these limitations?

[storyhub · Accepted solution]

You can upload a PDF, click on the uploaded image, and use the option to extract all pages as frames (be sure to check the box to convert the pages into frames). Once extracted, you can update the title of each frame to suit your needs for working with students.

If this works please click accept as a solution.

[barncro]

Holy cow...it does perform better when I let the page-extractor put each page in its own frame.  Support never mentioned that.

Why does that make such a difference?

[barncro]

Nope, actually, it's just that the trouble is sporadic and unpredictable.  Putting each page in its own frame (or not) doesn't make any reliable difference.  Too bad.

[barncro]

Just adding to this discussion to say that the trouble with large PDFs seems to come and go at random.  I think there may be one or two PDFs in particular that give trouble when scrolling through their pages.  Sometimes they give trouble, but then I delete them and reload the same files to the same whiteboard, and sometimes don't get any trouble.  I just can't find a pattern.

Zoom Support indicated that file size was the issue, but I've consistently loaded larger even larger PDFs with no trouble.  I'm baffled for the moment.

[mperng]

hi @barncro , developer for the PDF feature in Zoom Whiteboard here 👋

Regarding the performance of PDFs uploaded to the canvas, the performance is tied to the width & height and complexity of the PDF page, so if you have a massive page with a lot of graphics on it, you might see a frame rate drop or the PDFs might show up blurry.

Could you share your OS & OS version and a few example PDF files that are causing the issues? That'd be helpful for me to reproduce & fix the issue. Thanks!

[barncro]

I'll look into it, but the whole mess is proving impossible to reliably reproduce.  The same whiteboard, with the same PDFs, will sometimes become unusable, and then other times be okay.  I've got one whiteboard so large that it just won't load into a meeting...but only if I host in the browser version of Zoom.  It loads okay in the desktop version.

If I can nail down anything consistent, I'll pass it along.

[mperng]

@barncro by the Whiteboard being unusable, do you mean that you're unable to interact with it, i.e. you can't pan the view around, zoom in / out, click on any buttons?

[barncro]

On a related note:  does the overall load on the system change if I spread content over multiple whiteboard pages?

Put another way:  should I expect performance on Page 1 of a whiteboard to be affected by content on Page 2?

[Marina_StandOut]

Why not to use screen sharing of your pdfs instead? I personally use that feature for my Zoom group. You might have more control options with whiteboard, but just a friendly suggestion.