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Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

PDFs are such a huge part of the internet, especially in academic and scientific circles. This (soon to be) stable feature inside the browser is amazing for finally providing a seamless experience when browsing PDFs online alongside webpages. There's no performance hit, no giant plugins to install, no Adobe Update Manager yelling at you every 15 minutes to update, restart your computer, and put the shortcut back on your desktop. The instant you click on the PDF it's available. A lot of people are reporting that they didn't even realize that they were looking at PDFs after the update. They just thought it was another webpage. That's how well integrated it is.

Great job Chrome Devs, you're really setting the browser ahead of the pack.

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I appreciate the good news from Google, but I've often wondered why PDFs are so important in 'academic and scientific circles'. It seems that some sort of HTML solution would ultimately work better. It's certainly a very flexible format, easy to annotate, and easy to search. I'm often frustrated by the the difficulty of searching a large collection of PDFs or providing clean annotations when I'm reading papers. I still looking for tools that are good at both of these things.

Why don't we use HTML or something similar for making papers available?

In any case, thanks Google.

I've wondered the same thing myself, and I haven't come up with an answer I like. I think the reasons are mostly historical. Conference and journal proceedings are still literally printed, but - at least in my part of CS - most people read them on the computer. I'll print out papers that I think are really important, but I could do that with HTML, too.

I think it will take time or better technology to overcome the bias that we have when we see a good looking pdf document. It says "professional" in a way webpages don't, although I recognize this is completely irrational.

Papers are, as the name implies, intended to print on dead trees. At least in the academia world you'd like to be published. PDF is the (only?) solution that allows dot-perfect control on paper.

No web technology currently addresses this issue in a satisfying way, not to mention lack of complex math/chemistry/etc formulas. Even the use of specialized symbols on the web is pain.

HTML is not even close to provide the level of support needed for math in scientific papers. Using HTML is like going back 30 years, when we had things like troff, and later TeX.

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