

World's first embeddable HTML5 document viewer, from Crocodoc (YC W10) - waderoush
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/02/16/crocodoc-rolls-out-embeddable-html5-document-viewer-yc-startup-wants-to-be-the-new-adobe-of-the-web-sans-flash/

======
chwahoo
I apologize for being slightly off-topic. I think an open-source PDF -> HTML 5
renderer would be extremely useful and potentially disruptive. I suspect it
would produce lots of experimentation into the right way to read, annotate,
and manage documents.

This wheel has been reinvented now at a few different companies. Is anyone
aware of any projects actively building an open source canvas renderer?

While it would be great if crocodoc open-sourced their renderer, I'm sure
their business model rests (partially) on the difficulty for others to enter
this space.

------
bane
Link to a sample doc:

<http://crocodoc.com/CaDZXS?embedded=true>

drop the "embedded=true" to see it with their interface.

Beautiful stuff!

~~~
rdamico
Here is one of the most complex PDFs we've come across so far, at least in
terms of the typography and number of crazy fonts:
<http://crocodoc.com/KhoD84?embedded=true>

~~~
thristian
That's pretty impressive! However, I normally browse with "Allow web-pages to
choose their own fonts" disabled (since 99% of websites have terrible font
choices), and in this situation a lot of the text (most of page 37, or the
block on the right-hand-side of page 2) is rendered as gibberish; it looks
like it's using code-points from the Unicode private-use area. I guess that's
probably what the original PDF source document was doing, but it misses the
point of rendering things into HTML - even with font-changing enabled, I bet
copy/paste doesn't work too well.

Is it possible to ensure all text uses its original code-points, even at the
expense of exact reproduction, or is this just a fundamental problem with the
technology?

------
mckoss
I don't get it. Why do you need to _embed_ something that is natively
supported in the browser?

~~~
benatkin
As someone said in the HN comments for the TechCrunch article, CrocoDoc uses
their implementation of a document viewer to support annotation.

~~~
alexanderswang
Annotation benefits mostly when you view the document again, which means your
browser needs to reserve the file for some time like a month or longer, this
does not sound like everyone will do.

------
madewulf
I am working in a web agency, and people are definitely very excited here by
this product, but maybe not to use it exactly as intended: we have lots of
clients who have paper magazine and who would like to create an iPad version.

Currently, the tools that I have seen convert every page into an image, and
create an application from it (sometimes overlaying some links over the
images). It gives poor usability (impossible to select text, or to change the
font size for some part of the text). We would definitely be very interested
in a tool that could take our documents in pdf and give us back the html5 code
so that we can edit it manually (embedded videos instead of images, adding
some interactive feature) before packaging it as an iPad app.

There is definitively a market for tools allowing to do things like that. I am
wondering if Crocodoc has plans in this field.

------
guptaneil
It's nice to see so many of these tools that solve smaller problems really
well being released. I was just considering implementing something like this
for a later version of my own application, and now I can probably just use
their API when I'm ready for this feature, assuming prices are reasonable.
Everybody wins.

------
asnyder
Definitely not the first. Vuzit has been offering a non-flash document viewer
for years. <http://www.vuzit.com>.

~~~
rdamico
Ryan from Crocodoc here. It is fair to say that we're not the first non-Flash
document viewer -- there are some really solid image-based viewers like Vuzit
who have been around a lot longer than we have.

What we are the first to do is leverage new HTML5/CSS3 standards like SVG and
text transformations to create a fully embeddable document viewer that renders
text natively and has built-in commenting, markup, and PDF export
functionality.

You can compare the two different approaches used on the same document here:

[http://www.vuzit.com/blog/2010/10/vuzit-now-supports-
tight-i...](http://www.vuzit.com/blog/2010/10/vuzit-now-supports-tight-
integration-with-wordpress) (see embedded viewer under bullet #3)

<http://crocodoc.com/uzvIYS>

~~~
asnyder
They do offer PDF export functionality and annotations, but yes, I can see
where crocodoc has some nice advantages, possibly. I'm not associated with
Vuzit, but I am a user, so I don't necessarily know how they would respond to
this.

------
bloudermilk
Wow! A very impressive UI. Love the UX of the download feature. I hope these
guys go far—they're certainly on the right path. The only thing I would have
like to have seen is hover states on the buttons.

------
benatkin
I like how they provided a live example in the second page.

~~~
StavrosK
And which doesn't work in Opera :/

------
harisenbon
This looks absolutely amazing. Even works great on Powerpoint Slideshows.

I'm curious, is there anyway to programatically change the currently viewed
page? I assume you could just call a 'click' event on the PageDownBtn, but it
would be awesome to have some sort of API for making a slideshow
presentation....

------
Andi
HTML document viewer - isn't this a browser? To add the social stuff, what
about a browser plugin. This sounds like a joke. Why having another window in
a window? What do I do when I want to put a presentation online? I publish a
website.

------
nextparadigms
Didn't Scribd do this first?

~~~
budu3
With all due respect, I know that a lot of work goes into these YC companies,
but how is this ground breaking? Not simply for that fact that this seems like
a feature the Scribd provides but also that fact that this is clearly not the
next Google. We're seeing a lot of YC companies and startup founders in
general creating these non-compelling web 2.0 features and 'apps' getting a
lot of buzz and a descent amount of funding. This is not good for the startup
ecosystem as a whole. The VC and angel investors who would have provided some
kind of stop gap to weed out the next Pets.com have all drank the proverbial
Kool-aid and are tripping over themselves to invest in these companies. This
is creating a bubble scenario. This will hurt YC and in the long term. Please
let us return back to sanity.

~~~
rdamico
Ryan from Crocodoc here. The Adobe Acrobat product line alone is a $600M+/year
business. We believe that we can expand upon and disrupt that industry just
like Gmail did to Outlook and Google Docs is doing to Microsoft Word. So if
you ask us, we definitely have big plans for Crocodoc.

------
ThomPete
Will it embed the correct fonts?

~~~
betageek
If it does embed the correct fonts that raises a legal issue, from a font
licensing viewpoint.

------
sjs382
Do these embedded documents pass link popularity?

