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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

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 :) )

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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.

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