Law firms, legal departments, and courts manage thousands of documents every year. Many of these files are not modern digital documents but scanned copies of contracts, court filings, case records, and evidence documents.

These files are often stored in formats such as:

scanned PDFs
images (TIFF, PNG, JPG)
ODF files (ODT, ODS)
archived legal records

Without the right tools, reviewing these documents inside a web application becomes difficult. Users must download files, open them with external software, and manually search through pages.

A browser-based document viewer lets legal teams open and read these files inside their own .NET applications, and search the ones that carry a text layer.

Two products, and the distinction matters for everything below:

Doconut.app — the free public viewer. Useful for checking how a particular scan renders, but it is a hosted site with a 25 MB ceiling on PDFs, and a scanned case bundle passes that long before it runs out of pages. Do not put privileged material through it.
Doconut.com — the .NET SDK you install in your own environment. It renders on your servers and makes no calls out, which is the only arrangement that makes sense for client files.

The Challenge with Scanned Legal Files

Legal documentation frequently exists in scanned form because:

historical documents were digitized from paper archives
court filings are stored as scanned records
contracts are signed on paper and later scanned
evidence documents may originate from physical sources

Some of these files are page images with no text behind them, which creates several problems:

text cannot be searched
copying information is difficult
large case files take longer to review
legal teams must manually scroll through hundreds of pages

Others look identical on screen but do carry text, because the scanner or the document management system recognized it on the way in. That difference decides what a viewer can do with the file, and nothing on the page tells you which kind you are holding.

Searching a Scanned File: What Has to Be Inside It

A PDF holds page images and, separately, a text layer — the characters of the page and the position of each one. Scanning software and document management platforms usually write that layer as a document is captured, which is why a great many of the scanned files sitting in a case system are searchable already.

Where the text layer is present:

text becomes searchable
users can copy content
legal teams can locate information instantly

For example, a lawyer reviewing a large case file can search for:

a specific clause in a contract
a person’s name mentioned in testimony
references to legal statutes
important dates in case documents

Instead of manually scanning pages, they can jump directly to the relevant section.

Where it is absent — a photograph of a page, an old fax, a print scanned with recognition turned off — the file still opens and renders, but there is no text in it to match. Doconut does not read characters off a page image today. The fix is at capture rather than at review: turn text recognition on in whatever scans or ingests the documents, so everything arriving from now on is searchable, and treat the image-only backlog as a separate, known set.

Supporting Multiple Legal Document Formats

Legal document systems must handle a wide range of formats.

A modern document viewer supports formats such as:

PDF
ODF documents (ODT, ODS)
Word documents (DOC, DOCX)
scanned images (JPG, PNG, TIFF)

This flexibility allows law firms and legal departments to centralize document access in a single platform.

Users can open any supported document directly inside the browser without installing additional software.

Benefits for Legal Applications

Integrating a document viewer into legal platforms enables several powerful workflows.

Case Management Systems

Legal case management platforms store thousands of documents related to each case.

With an integrated viewer:

documents open instantly inside the platform
lawyers can review files without downloading them
full-text search runs across every file that carries a text layer

This significantly speeds up case preparation.

Digital Legal Archives

Many law firms maintain large archives of historical documents.

A viewer with text-layer search allows teams to:

search decades of scanned records, wherever the scan captured the text
preview documents instantly
reduce time spent reviewing files manually

This transforms static archives into searchable knowledge bases.

Evidence and Discovery Review

During legal discovery processes, teams must review large volumes of documents.

A browser-based viewer enables:

quick inspection of evidence files
secure access from internal portals
faster navigation through complex document sets

Easy Integration into .NET Applications

The viewer can be embedded into many types of .NET applications, including:

ASP.NET Core
ASP.NET MVC
Blazor
WebForms

Once integrated, legal teams can open and review documents directly in their browser without installing external viewers.

Developers can integrate the viewer into:

legal case management systems
document management platforms
compliance systems
internal legal portals

Secure Document Viewing

Legal documents often contain sensitive information such as contracts, personal data, and confidential case material.

With the SDK installed in your own environment:

the document is rendered on your servers, and the component makes no calls out to us
access is restricted by your own authentication, because every page request hits your endpoint
files never leave infrastructure you already control and already audit

Be precise about the division of labour when this reaches a security review. The SDK's contribution is architectural: the file stays inside your boundary. Encryption at rest, token issuance, retention and audit logging are your application's, built on controls you already operate. Doconut holds no ISO 27001, SOC 2 or HIPAA attestation, and no viewer component can confer compliance on the system around it.

Conclusion

Legal teams rely heavily on scanned documents, contracts, and archived records. Without the right tools, these files slow down research, case preparation, and document review.

By integrating a browser-based document viewer into .NET applications, organizations can put scanned files in front of the people who need them, and search the ones their capture process left searchable.

Key advantages include:

full-text search wherever the PDF carries a text layer — and a clear answer, rather than a vague one, where it does not
support for legal formats including PDF, ODF, Word and scanned images
direct browser viewing without installing software
integration into ASP.NET Core, MVC, Blazor and WebForms platforms

One last time, because it is the thing most likely to be misremembered from an article like this: there is no OCR. Search finds text a file already carries. If your archive is image-only, a viewer will not make it searchable, and the fix belongs at capture — turn recognition on in whatever scans or ingests documents from now on, and treat the existing image-only set as a separate project with its own budget.

To try the rendering on one file, free: Doconut.app. To integrate it where client documents actually live: Doconut.com.