How do you access Preview documents on iCloud?

This doesn't answer the OP's question.

Bump, ditto, retweet, whatever. The lack of any means of directly browsing the iCloud file store is truly bewildering to me. As a long-time paid ".mac"/MobileMe user, it breaks my heart that I am having to rely on third-party solutions like Dropbox for such elementary functions.

Yes this is a bit absurd. What exactly is the point of having iCloud integration with Preview or TextEdit? Unless I go to someone elses Mac, turn off their iCloud, and then login to mine they are just stuck there. This seems pretty useless. I can't believe Apple put this into Preview without a Preview app to view them? Worthless integration, and that irritates me. They have had plenty of time to get a Preview app out. Why in the world wouldn't they do this? People read PDFs all the time from work, or school. At the very least give my iBooks app access to these PDFs in the cloud without me having to manually import them and then sync. Short sighted and stupid.

I am also having this issue. I moved all of my PDF's to iCloud because Apple indicates that iCloud is the gold standard for syncing files between iOS and OS X devices. I even paid for additional storage to accommodate all of my documents.

How on earth do I access these PDFs in iCloud on my iPad?

I'm with ya JeffdotC...and everyone else.

I miss my idisk/mobile me.

From what I could tell, the only way to access preview documents is to buy the iWorks apps for the iPhone as iOS Safari doesn't even allow you to get to the icloud website where you can log in.

A free alternative, though with limited space is Dropbox. Their iOS works seemlessly. You install a Dropbox folder on your Mac, drag a file to it and within a few seconds you will see it propogated in the Dropbox app on your iPhone. Touch the PDF file and it automatically opens in a PDF reader view. Not the answer you were looking for, but a functional and pretty much identical alternative.

More miss-information. IOS iWorks does not allow you to display iCloud PDF's. There is no corresponding IOS Preview App.

AMR_NY

I own the Pages, Numbers & Keynote. Non of them allow you to view Preview docs saved to iCloud.

If you actually read what I said, I said the only way I could tell, which means I was basing it off of what was indicated on the Apple Website as to how to access Documents from iCloud. I didn't say the only way I was able to access docs was through iWorks. If I knew this was actually the way I would have said how to do it with iWorks, the same as I did with Dropbox. Dropbox definitely works as I did it 10 seconds before I typed my first post.

So we still don't have a solution to this problem after all this time. I had hoped that with the release of iBooks 3, it would have had the ability to view PDF documents that you store in iCloud with Preview. But it doesn't. I'm just simply amazed Apple hasn't provided us a solution. They've had ample opportunity - first IOS 6 and then iBooks 3. In the meantime, you can still use the workarounds using Good Reader as have been previously described or you can just forget iCloud completely for PDF's and just store your PDF's in DropBox or Google Docs and view them on your IOS device that way. Sad, Apple has dropped the ball on this one. I read PDF's a lot and hate I can't use Preview to maintain my documents via iCloud.

Absolutely agree 100%.

Can we get an Apple representative to comment on this? Is this an issue that Apple is even aware of or planning to address?

Apple doesn't participate in the forum. It's user-to-user.

I think the preview issue is that this syncing of PDF via preview is for mac to mac only, not yet available for iOS devices.

Hey all,

Just to make it clear, this limitation is due to the design of iCloud. Until Apple either changes how iCloud works or releases a Preview.app for iOS, it's probably best to give up on iCloud Documents for Preview and TextEdit. In fact, you're probably best served by just giving up on iCloud Documents all together, unfortunately, as this problem will happen again and again with apps that don't have Mac or iOS counterparts.

The documents-tied-to-individual-apps model Apple is currently persuing with iCloud will likely just lead to too many headaches for almost all use cases. It's already a ridiculous amount of work to send an entire project of 3 or 4 files from various apps to another Mac or iOS user, even if you all have the same apps. It's impossible to do basic things like read and edit PDF, RTF, and TXT between Mac and iOS. And you can't share documents between apps that support the same file type.

Here are the ways to help Apple get the message:

1. Go to iCloud Feedback and fill out the form.
2. Create a Developer Account (they used to be free, not sure now) and file a Bug Report. It will be marked a duplicate and closed, but the more bug reports for the same issue Apple gets the more likely they will do something.
3. Vote with your use habits and stop using iCloud Documents.

While I wouldn't go so far as to call iCloud a failure, it is a bit odd that we don't have a Preview app for iOS. If it did the basic editting and signatures that the OS X version does, it would be fantastic. I get docs I have to sign all the time. No big deal on my Mac, but I'd love to be able to use my iPhone when out and about. I think the thing that really bugs me is that Preview on OS X got the whole Save to icloud feature, as well as the open menu before any other apps... and its worthless. What is the point of building it into Preview and Text Edit if there is no where you can look at these documents other than the computer you saved the thing to iCloud with!

Apple, surely you have a Preview app in the works, right? This is a huge whole in the cloud strategy!

I'm not saying iCloud as a whole is a failure for everyone. And even iCloud Documents can prove useful in some very basic use cases.

I did personally just have my email aliases, Contacts, Photo Stream, and all iOS iCloud backups get corrupted on Apple's servers over the past 3 months, with about 1 month of data loss on all iOS devices due to the backup failures (I was restoring them at Apple's advice to fix the other iCloud problems). So it has been just about a total failure for me, and I say that as someone who never had an iTools/.Mac/MobileMe problem beyond the occasional email outage...

But if you want more than the bare minimum in cloud document storage, I think most users will currently be better served by Dropbox or the like. At some point, usually when you least expect it, you're going to need one of those iCloud Document-based PDFs or RTF files while away from your Mac. You'll only have a PC or iOS device to try to get it. And you won't be able to do so if you're using iCloud Documents.

Just my 2 cents.