Talk:File viewer

Untitled
It would be nice to have some links to file viewer....

What about GNU info ? How does this relate? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.186.170.75 (talk • contribs) 00:08, 6 July 2002 (UTC)

Merge
I suggest Image viewer be merged into this article. An image viewer is a type of file viewer, and the material in that article would be very much at home here. Rwxrwxrwx 19:35, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Operational and commercial context for file access apps and perhaps other freeware
Whether this topic is merged or dissected, an orientation for context is needed, and references to open source & free software, & public or open standard formats is important to understanding this subject. Irfanview, VLF, NoScript, AVG, ... and other such tools are important to researchers and users. Understanding the licensors motives in increasing the audience of potential licensees (authors using the paid software) & reputation building. Also security software companies which give free security software as a loss-leader or scan only (perhaps with a mention of misleading, fraudulent, intrusive, or infective free scanners). There are existing lists of file formats (file name extensions), each extension has its own history and operational / commercial / social environment.Wikidity (talk) 21:15, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Merge?
I came to this article while looking for text oriented file viewers, which is what I think of when I hear "file viewer." In a sense, almost every program is a file viewer of some sort. Browsers leap to mind, and all of the Microsoft read-only viewers. I think text viewers and image viewers are big enough categories to keep separate.

Next?
Nextstep had a File Viewer app.

Intentional limitations
"A file viewer is a limited-functionality software in a sense that it does not have a capability to create a file, or modify the content of an existing one. Instead, it is used only to display or print the content. The primary reason behind this missing functionality is due to marketing considerations..."

Many user-oriented proprietary-format applications are read-only for marketing reasons, to try to sell the full versions for more money. But, this is not at all true of file-viewing utility tool programs. These are read-only on purpose, in order to be safe-use no-worry tools. Also, being read-only makes them simpler, smaller, faster, more agile. A simple tool can quickly browse back and forth through a file, showing a small window, without having to load the whole thing into memory. -69.87.199.227

Text file viewers
The article is missing links to actual file viewing programs. Three free portable ones are listed here: -69.87.199.227 18:49, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
 * "Universal Viewer Free (formally ATViewer) is a file viewer that supports many different formats like text, binary, rtf, images, videos, audio, etc. One nice feature is that it can open large text files very quickly without eating memory. One downside is that there is no editing of these files, but useful if you have to go through large log files."
 * "DAMN NFO Viewer is an utility for viewing text files containing ASCII art (eg. NFO and DIZ files). The viewer displays graphical block characters correctly, and automatically detects and displays hyperlinks/email addresses as clickable links."
 * "Large Text File Viewer is designed for viewing large text files. It uses little memory and is able to open very large files (> 1GB) instantly. Background file indexing makes browsing even faster. It also allows the user to perform high-speed complex text search by means of plain text or regular expression."

General File Viewers
There is a class of file viewers found in record management and search software which exists to display a huge variety of files. Examples are:
 * Oracle's Outside In which can render files from 300+ applications.
 * HP IDOL KeyView — Preceding unsigned comment added by John hartley (talk • contribs) 03:50, 24 August 2018 (UTC)