
Show HN: Pdf.js-based real-time collaborative viewer for Chrome - jordanthoms
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notable-docs-%E2%80%93-pdf-viewer/ecnphlgnajanjnkcmbpancdjoidceilk?hl=en-US&utm_source=hn
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emillon

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Classy!

Form aside, this looks like a very interesting product, as others I wanted to
work on something similar too. Good luck!

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jordanthoms
... this is what happens when you finally get something working at 6am :)

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highwind
What is the benefit of creating a web app that only works in 1 particular
browser? Or is this not a web app?

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jordanthoms
The extension is currently only available for Chrome, but all the
functionality is available at
[http://web.notabledocs.com/web/viewer.html](http://web.notabledocs.com/web/viewer.html)
\- If you share your document, that's what the other people get. We actually
work offline (including making comments) if you install the extension.

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santa_boy
Cool stuff! Something I've been thinking about too. Open Source?

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jordanthoms
Not right now, but it's something we're considering - we certainly owe a lot
to Mozilla's PDF.js, which is doing the PDF rendering for us. It's just tricky
to decide to give away the code when you don't yet know what part of your
startup is (hopefully) going to be valuable.

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habosa
This is EXACTLY the product I wanted to make, thanks!

I think a use case for which you could sell it is collaborative class note-
taking. My teachers distribute PDFs of their lecture slides before class which
students use to take notes on (so that they don't have to recreate figures,
etc). I have always thought it would be great for this PDF-markup process to
take place live in some sort of Google Doc interface. This looks like the best
solution I have seen so far!

If you really wanted to run with the student use case, you could then allow
students to publicly/privately organize the annotated notes by class and
lecture slot so that other people could benefit from the notes.

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jordanthoms
We actually made that product first! -
[http://www.notable.ac](http://www.notable.ac) is similar, but made
specifically for students, documents are organized by course and notes can be
made public/private/shared with friends.

It does take a bit more work to setup, because you have to upload the
documents to the site first (we process them into images on the server, and
support Word/Powerpoint as well as PDF).

We had trouble getting traction in the education space - So we built the
Chrome version, which works much better for single documents and for uses
outside education. But we're still keeping notable.ac running so feel free to
give it a try.

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mitar
We are working on open source project, quite similar to this:
[http://peerlibrary.org/](http://peerlibrary.org/)

[https://github.com/peerlibrary/peerlibrary](https://github.com/peerlibrary/peerlibrary)

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zobzu
its kinda "funny" how pdf.js is used for Chrome in a way that only works with
chrome. (given that it comes from firefox)

thanks for walled gardens google!

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malandrew
Huh? How so?

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elandybarr
This app caused me a lot of trouble. I tried to save some PDFs and they were
impossible to open in any reader. I opened them with Notepad++ and they were
now HTML files. Also, there is security issue of giving full access to your
PDF downloads away. Sometimes financial institutions generate PDFs with
account and identiy information; this app by default doesn't ask you if you
want to give it to them, it just automatically does so.

I like the concept and hope to download a future iteration. Just some
feedback.

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jordanthoms
Sorry you had trouble with saving PDFs - I'll look into it and see if we have
a bug there.

We don't actually upload the PDFs to our servers unless you explicitly use our
'share' function. This is something we consider critical to the product, for
the privacy reasons you mentioned. We do send a fingerprint of the document to
our servers to check if anybody has added comments to it. (The comments you
make are saved to our servers however).

Hope this answers some of your concerns, feel free to email us at
support@notabledocs.com if you have any other feedback

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vagarwa
We have an extension (for chrome) and a bookmarklet (and ipad app) that use
pdf.js to add comments to pdfs and save specific pages from pdfs. The
extension and bookmarklet allow commenting on any page that can be rendered on
a web page (including Pdfs!). We are now targeting it for education. Will love
feedback (provided our site doesn't crash)
[http://www.surfmark.com](http://www.surfmark.com)

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angersock
Hah, the layout is almost exactly like a thing I'd developed last year:
comment threads on the right, callouts into the document on the left.

Pretty cool--if anyone's interested, I'll try to get the source code released.

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santa_boy
Yes. Would be a great starter for a project I am working on.

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Nican
Can this app be an item in the "chrome://apps/" page, and use my google
credentials for logging in? Or some form of OpenID?

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jordanthoms
We're working on adding Google Login at the moment. You can install the App
version from [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notable-
docs/iljoj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notable-
docs/iljojpiodmlhoehoecppliohmplbgeij?hl=en-US&utm_source=chrome-ntp-launcher)
, although it doesn't support offline at the moment.

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denik
pdf.js is great. we used it at surfly to implement purely web-based
collaborative pdf viewer that works on any modern browser.

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skrowl
Actual project link (OP just goes to Chrome/NSA app store):
[http://notabledocs.com/](http://notabledocs.com/)

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jordanthoms
The listing on the Chrome store is more up to date, so I linked to that - but
the landing page works too :)

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lilyw
Very useful!

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lavash
How long take to make it? How many persons are in your team? Is it a kind of
side project?

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Hengjie
The MVP took about a month, and probably 3 months to polish. Working full time
with 2 hackers, hipster and a hustler.

