
Official Gmail Blog: Fast PDF viewing right in your browser - Anon84
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/fast-pdf-viewing-right-in-your-browser.html
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staunch
They're doing something tricky too. It looks like they're converting pages to
PNG, but maintaining the ability to highlight text. I don't think there's any
Flash there either.

I gotta say, Scribd's PDF viewer is looking pretty clunky now!

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aston
My best guess on implementation for that is to send back a list of selectable
rectangles along with the PNG, then highlight them via javascript. No clue how
they're copying it to my clipboard, though...

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amix
The solution I know of is to use Flash as a proxy to copy to the clipboard. I
don't think there is a standard way of doing this without going through Flash.

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emmett
Javascript has copy-to-clipboard functions available in most modern browsers.

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kaens
Don't you have to change a user preference to do it in firefox?

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andreyf
Feature request: docs.google.com/pdfview?{URL}

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cowmoo
So what's this going to mean for scribd? Are they going to go way of the YC
startup web 2.0 calendar that ebayed themselves off, after Google Calendar
came out?

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andr
Even worse, they are going the way of a company built around a feature. Kiko
users would have had to consciously move to Google Calendar. With PDF viewing
most people won't even notice if what they are using changed. (I'm not ranting
against Scribd - the same applies to others, like YouTube, which are
essentially viewers for data that's hard to view.)

Scribd's approach of being a destination website is completely broken IMHO,
because the Web already has a destination to read any type of text - the Web
itself. What they should've had is a Firefox plugin that captures my PDF links
and opens them in Scribd instead of Adobe Reader. Google is doing this for
mail and I'm sure a feature like that is in the plans for Google Toolbar.

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emmett
This is a completely different thing than Scribd.

Scribd is a document uploading and management service that converts .pdfs,
.docs, .xls, everything under the sun.

This is an extremely nice way to view PDFs linked to from google search and
gmail.

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lacker
It doesn't seem _completely_ different.

Scribd: Upload a document, make it visible to anyone Gmail: Email a document,
make it visible to anyone (that you explicitly name)

Scribd: Converts pdf, doc, xls, lots of stuff Gmail: Converts pdf, doc,
supports any file type (the recipient may need software for it)

Seems to me like both are squarely aimed at the "sharing documents" market.

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emmett
Scribd is all about turning documents into public URLs.

The new google service is about sending documents to people or small groups.

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jrockway
This is very nice. I wish there was a Firefox plugin that would automatically
make all PDFs open in this. I hate the disruption of having to switch to
another application to view text that happens to be in a different format.
(Even embedding gv inside Firefox would be acceptable, actually.)

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mattmcknight
You should give it a shot. You might have to gmail the docs to yourself
though, which could rival Acrobat startup time.

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tlrobinson
Fast PDF viewing right in your browser? Like Safari has built in?

I'm tired of "solutions" to this non-problem for people with decent browsers.
Can you at least detect that I'm using a browser that handles PDFs well and
just give me the original?

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Anon84
Just click "download" instead of "view"... problem solved. gmail gives you
both options.

Most of the times I open up pdf attchemtens in Preview, but this come in handy
when I just need to take a quick look at an attachments to check something.

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cracki
in Chrome, clicking "Download" in gmail, it gives me a "Save File as" dialog.
it _can_ display PDFs alright. it's just that gmail tells it to download all
attachments when choosing "download" instead of just displaying them.

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adityakothadiya
I love these guys!

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gustaf
discovered this yesterday. soo amazing. now I just waiting for powerpoint
previews

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Anon84
it already does that... ;)

[http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...](http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64603)

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AndrewWarner
In my account, I'm forced to use Google's viewer before I could download. I
wish gmail let me decide whether I want to download or view.

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zitterbewegung
I found about this a week ago and it kicks ass. It really helps when you are
working with scientific information which is all in PDF's.

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shimi
Android does the same for PDF attachments

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hs
nice, i'll gmail myself my pdf ebooks

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drawkbox
Look at #20: 20= 05-Aug-1986 STARGATE.COM

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drawkbox
hrm strange I commented on this thread:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396485> with this. bug? It is a list of
top 100 urls ever registered. I just though stargate.com was odd being #20.

