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Comment by ebikelaw | Hacker News Reader

OR I can just read and edit PDFs in the peak-optimized, ahead-of-time-compiled native PDF reader that comes on my computer.

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Ha! Not sure if you've seen it, but we offer native SDKs for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux. Our Web SDK also has a version that uses PSPDFKit Server via a Docker container to get faster performance.

The performance difference to native is smaller than you might think though - see our post from a few months back: https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2017/webassembly-a-new-hope/

PSPDFKit for Web Standalone is a great choice for an easy-to-deploy web viewer, annotation editor and form filler, and performance is great. Definitely better than pdf.js - which is typically where people start with, before they upgrade to PSPDFKit for Web.

> Our Web SDK also has a version that uses PSPDFKit Server via a Docker container to get faster performance.

...what. why would I want that over a library that I can do whatever I want with?

On my computer, the native PDF reader is xpdf, which is made of security holes, or something based on libpoppler, which is made of patches to xpdf.

You mean "open cell security foam" of course. It means the same thing but sounds better for marketing.

Right? The built in safari reader does everything correctly and interacts with the rest of the OS properly. I assume that the built in chrome one also Just Works (tm).

Also why would I want to download an entire pdf engine when i already have an AOT version? (Stealing that phrasing by the way :) )

Safari's PDF viewer doesn't allow you to annotate, especially not in real time with other users: https://pspdfkit.com/instant/

It's also quite basic when it comes to forms and often loses data.

For cases where more performance is required we always recommend using PSPDFKit Server, so PDFs render in native code on a high-power machine, and very likely using cached tiles.

>Safari's PDF viewer doesn't allow you to annotate, especially not in real time with other users: https://pspdfkit.com/instant/*
I never asked for that though, so there's that.

I can see people wanting that, but then I'd have to wonder why they are using PDFs for that purpose and not something like Google Docs.

Think construction plans, PowerPoint presentations, contracts - there are many documents that don't fit the classical Word document model.

I wonder if the PDF file format is the best one for such kind of content

Turns out that it is - it's amazingly flexible and pretty much anything out there will be able to render it. There's practically no other formats that can claim that.

But why would one expect a browser to support that feature for PDFs?

You wouldn't, and it doesn't. But webapps and websites can usefully do it.

I prefer the sandboxed PDF reader in my browser to the native one that's not sandboxed
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/24/apple_security_upda...

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