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Gmail has recently changed the UI for attachments. The options offered for an attachment is to download it to disk, save it to Google Drive or right click to open it in a new tab.

In the old interface I quite often used the view option when the attachment was a PDF or DOC file or something similar. I found the option view as HTML in the built-in viewer quite useful, in particular when I wanted to copy some part of text from the attachment.

Can I somehow view the attachment as HTML in the new interface?

I mean something like the plain HTML mode—see the following picture:

gmail-pdf-html.jpg

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Yes, you can. Click anywhere else but on the Download or Save to Drive buttons and it will open the document inline, in an overlay.

enter image description here

Like this:

enter image description here

And here you can see that the document is rendered as HTML:

enter image description here

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  • I've tried this. I do not see how to get to view as html option.
    – Martin
    Nov 30, 2013 at 9:40
  • @Martin That is the HTML view. If you open a document, be it PDF or DOC, like that and then check it with the web inspector, you will see that its content is rendered as HTML.
    – Alex
    Nov 30, 2013 at 9:59
  • Thanks! I did not notice that I can copy the text even from this view. (I am not sure whether I remember it correctly, but I think I had to choose plain HTML if I wanted to copy text in the old interface.)
    – Martin
    Nov 30, 2013 at 10:11
  • You most certainly can copy text from this view, either from a PDF or from a DOC. (I personally like better this view that the previous open-in-new-tab one.)
    – Alex
    Nov 30, 2013 at 10:14

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