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Comment by joubert | Hacker News Reader

Google already does a great job of showing PDF files using HTML and JavaScript. Don't think it is huge risk.

Plus the upside is their stuff will then work on mobile devices too.

Google rasterizes the PDF and streams it to you as an image. Scribd will be converting documents to HTML and CSS while maintaining a near perfect facsimile of the original document.

Google does a lot more than that. For example copy and paste works if you select some text and copy it out. That's non trivial.

That is true, their conversion understands text regions and various other things. However, what makes Scribd's viewer more sophisticated is that it will actually use structured HTML to render the document content. This is more than just putting on a layer that specifies regions in the document, it will actually just be a normal HTML document, made of divs, text, images, etc.

Plus, it will maintain the fidelity of the document -- meaning that even PDFs with complicated layouts will be rendered properly in HTML. No trivial task.

What will be the main advantage?

It's a great technical challenge, but will users notice the difference?

This is a little indirect, but presumably the googlebot will find it easier to index scribd pages, which might help you as a user if you're searching for something that's hosted on scribd.

True, although .pdf files are already indexed. Do we also need to have html5 versions of those same pdfs indexed? I'm not sure we do.

Users will be able to easily view PDFs on the web from any device. I primarily read HN on my phone. Any time I see a [Scribd] link, I forget about the story because I can't read it. I have also had several occasions where I needed to read a PDF on the go. I had to email it to a friend and then call them, dictating the pertinent bits over the phone.

Once this is live, Scribd will gain at least myself as a user, and I suspect many more.

(Nesting is too deep to reply to axod, so: the fact that Google is doing this should be reason enough. Scribd exists as a place to publish material. That material should be reachable by as many users as they can manage.)

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://infolab.stanford.edu...

Works fine for me :/

Although the semantic web is still pie-in-sky-land, having your content structured instead of a big block o' text is always better.

Especially if your users are disabled.

The Google PDF has an OCRed text component to it, Google Books is a real bear to use on the iPhone. On the iPad, depending on the book, it can be acceptable (when compared to the pain of trying it on the iPhone!).

I don't know how Scribd is going to carry this off, what with people sometimes uploading outright scans of books. I mean, Scribd is not Scribd without the stuff put there by people -- like with Youtube.

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