
PDF goodness in Chrome - shrikant
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/11/pdf-goodness-in-chrome.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FEgta+%28Google+Chrome+Blog%29
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riobard
Is it just me, or is there anyone else on OS X thinks the rendering of the
default Preview.app is so much better than Chrome?

One of the few reasons I constantly bounce between Safari and Chrome is the
ability to render PDF beautifully. I haven't yet seen a better PDF rendering
engine than the OS X built-in one.

~~~
msbarnett
Yes, the rendering is much worse than in Preview. If you go to:

    
    
        Preferences -> Under the Hood -> Content Settings... -> Plug-ins -> Disable individual plug-ins...
    

you can turn it off and have PDFs revert to downloading for viewing in
Preview.

~~~
riobard
Is there any way to open PDF in Chrome but use Preview.app to render it (like
in Safari)?

I guess most likely it's not possible...

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sp4rki
I really don't understand what the big deal is with PDF support. If I click on
a PDF I'd rather it download to my computer and gets opened with the
appropriate application, rather than using developer time in a feature that
feels out of place within Chrome.

This feature has been available in the dev channel of Chrome for ages, and
until now it's still unstable. PDF's tend big documents, and it's generally
the case that Chrome locks up and ends up crashing when opening a PDF that's
more than a few pages. This defeats the purpose in my opinion. The moment I
notice I'm loading a PDF in Chrome I go ballistic trying to close the tab to
avoid the crash.

I'd rather have developers improving the bookmark manager than trying to make
a browser a PDF reader also. And a bad one at it. This makes me want to go
back to the Chromium nightly builds. Those where awesome and bullshit free.

~~~
riobard
It's quite a decent and neat feature if you have to read a lot of PDF's (i.e.
academic paper hunting): you can quickly scan through the PDF opened in your
browser and decide if you want to actually keep it. Otherwise the PDF will
just be downloaded to your Download folder and then you have to read through
them and clean up those unwanted.

That being said, I don't like Chrome's implementation though. Usually switch
to Safari for "PDF mode".

~~~
jast
This. I moved back to Safari because with Chrome it's so painful to do paper
hunting. It's much easier and fast to skim over and then decide which ones to
save and read.

~~~
mturmon
And additionally, when the paper opens in-browser, the location and browse
history that got you to that paper is preserved. So when you're in the web
browser and see the pdf of the paper by I.M. Smart and A. U. Thor, you can
tell whether you got it from Smart's site, Thor's site, or somewhere else.

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Pewpewarrows
PDFs are such a huge part of the internet, especially in academic and
scientific circles. This (soon to be) stable feature inside the browser is
amazing for finally providing a seamless experience when browsing PDFs online
alongside webpages. There's no performance hit, no giant plugins to install,
no Adobe Update Manager yelling at you every 15 minutes to update, restart
your computer, and put the shortcut back on your desktop. The instant you
click on the PDF it's available. A lot of people are reporting that they
didn't even realize that they were looking at PDFs after the update. They just
thought it was another webpage. That's how well integrated it is.

Great job Chrome Devs, you're really setting the browser ahead of the pack.

~~~
joshrule
I appreciate the good news from Google, but I've often wondered why PDFs are
so important in 'academic and scientific circles'. It seems that some sort of
HTML solution would ultimately work better. It's certainly a very flexible
format, easy to annotate, and easy to search. I'm often frustrated by the the
difficulty of searching a large collection of PDFs or providing clean
annotations when I'm reading papers. I still looking for tools that are good
at both of these things.

Why don't we use HTML or something similar for making papers available?

In any case, thanks Google.

~~~
coliveira
HTML is not even close to provide the level of support needed for math in
scientific papers. Using HTML is like going back 30 years, when we had things
like troff, and later TeX.

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ccomputinggeek
PDFs are a pain but they they exist and dare I say it, I'd rather receive a
PDF from my Windows brethren than a MS Word document :-(

Having this will make my world just a little bit more convenient!

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charlief
My worst experience on Chrome or any browser isn't Flash or a suite of
extensions I am using. Most of the pain comes from Acrobat integration that
locks up a core at the worst time with all Chrome tabs seizing to function and
a Chrome tab process to crash soon after. Any alternative to Acrobat is
welcome, especially one by Google that can integrate seamlessly, and will
allow me to finally left-click on a link to a PDF instead of downloading and
opening the document separately.

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nopal
Wow, their implementation is _fast_! I've never seen a browser open a PDF as
fast as it opens a Web page, but this has got to be close. Very impressive.

~~~
pjscott
I've always been impressed by Safari's integrated PDF reader. It's still more
polished than what Chrome has, though I look forward to Chrome closing the gap
before too long.

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pedrokost
The feature has been in the dev channel for weeks. I am glad they decided to
implement pdf support in the browser, and I love the speed at which it works.
I also love the lack of chrome and the ability to right click on the pdf and
save it. However, the Foxit software they are using is not very good IMO. I
had it installed previously on my machine, and it crashed a lot with files
over 20 pages. Now Chrome crashes almost every time I open a large PDF file.
So, I uninstalled Foxit Reader and reverted to Acrobat. It is slower to open,
but doesn't crash nearly as much as Foxit.

Why didn't the Chrome team incorporate the original Adobe Reader instead of
Foxit?

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rdamico
I wonder how this will affect Google's online PDF viewer [1]. On one hand
Google can clearly provide a faster experience by rolling their own client-
side viewer, but on the other an online viewer can be used across browsers and
devices, and more easily integrate with Google Docs.

[1]
[http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://labs.google.com/pap...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable-
osdi06.pdf)

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iuguy
I'd never use the words PDF and goodness in the same sentence. I doubt Didier
Stevens (<http://blog.didierstevens.com/>) would either.

Don't get me wrong, I like Chrome (in fact I'm using it now) but it's a
browser. I don't want a document viewer, I just want to surf the Internet.

~~~
AndrewDucker
The web serves files. Some of them are HTML, some of them are not. I don't
have a problem with web browsers displaying anything that has a standard
defining it.

~~~
iuguy
But is it the browser's job to internally render the files, or pass them on to
the appropriate player?

As smart as the Google guys are, PDF is a mess of a format. Why should we
think that Google are better than anyone else at implementing one safely?

~~~
ximeng
Of possible interest to people wondering about security of PDFs is that the
current Honeynet Project Forensic Challenge requires analysis of a malicious
PDF.

Not a direct link with Google, although it looks like the project itself is
fairly active with Google Summer of Code.

Edit: link for interested parties

<http://project.honeynet.org/node/583>

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mquander
Previously:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1871521>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440463>

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kierank
It's a licensed version of Foxit PDF reader fwiw. It's not open source
unfortunately.

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kwantam
The PDF reader in 7.0.517.41 for Linux has trouble rendering math in some
documents, e.g., <http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0204033>

It might just be a font thing.

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theclay
Finally! The Chrome team seems to be making every good decision out there.

PDF's are everywhere, but browser support--especially in Chrome--has been
crap.

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getonit
'PDF goodness' is a purely theoretical concept, IMHE. I'll not use any of my
time testing that belief ever again, but would love to be able to abandon
it... fingers crossed.

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bhiggins
It's faster to load PDFs than anything I've ever used previously. Thanks
Google & Foxit.

