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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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