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Comment by anewaccountname | Hacker News Reader

Why not scribd every link to an HTML-based webpage so that we can go through yet another layer of indirection?

Your sarcasm doesn't acknowledge iPaper's potential. PDFs are actually somewhat annoying to open for many people. Scribd's platform independent solution is actually pretty cool.

It depends on Flash, it isn't any more platform independent than the acrobat reader is.

And if you don't like Adobe, for Windows there's Foxit Reader, and for Linux there's Evince.

I can't vouch for Foxit, but viewing PDFs through Evince is also far more efficient in terms of processor usage, especially since flash seems to like to take up all the cycles it can get.

Foxit is great, it feels much more like a Linux PDF reader than Adobe's reader. The editor is also good, it lets you edit PDFs at a relatively low level.

It's choosing the lesser of two Adobe evils. I'll take Flash over Acrobat Reader any second.

If there were only two evils, I might agree with you. But there are better options than either of the two you mention, for example Preview on a Mac or Sumatra PDF in Windows. Converting to Flash makes it harder to use a decent program to view PDFs, picking evil for everyone, not just those who use Adobe Reader.

So platform independent it doesn't work on devices such as iPhones. ;-)

I say add an extra link or make it a cookie preference, so I can have different settings depending on where I am.

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