Crocodoc (YC W10) Launches HTML5-Based Document Viewer With Its Own API | Hacker News Reader

Crocodoc (YC W10) Launches HTML5-Based Document Viewer With Its Own API

techcrunch.com

71 pointsNSMeta13 comments

My writing group uses Crocodoc when we exchange drafts and provide feedback. Keeping all of the annotations in one place means that I don't have to worry about having 4 different copies of a document (each one commented on by a different person) floating around my e-mail or hard drive.

In fact, this is a service I'd gladly pay for if the folks at Crocodoc would give me a way to do so.

From the article: "In other words, you now have one less reason to fire up your bloated copy of Adobe Acrobat."

Using OSX's Preview PDF reader, I haven't used Adobe Acrobat for years. Preview is fast-loading, and has all the features one could want in a desktop PDF reader.

But for a browser-based reader, I could see Crocodoc being useful and certainly the interface is well-done.

I love Preview, but have found that when I use the annotation feature and send it to others who use other PDF viewers (FoxIt, Acrobat Reader, et al) that the annotations don't always behave like they should.

Agreed. There are advantages to an HTML5 PDF reader. Aside from just being more accessible, I could see how sharing and collaboration tools become more effective with an in-browser solution.

This looks nice! I've long wanted a PDF viewer that had annotations that appeared off to the side and could be annotated collaboratively so I'm very excited to see that crocodoc has made progress in that direction.

Some misc. comments:

* The "chrome" isn't very android friendly. I'd really like to have something like this that would work well on a mobile device. In fact, it would be nice to have a full mobile app allowing local annotation/syncing with your web service. Currently, I just tried the site on my phone, but I have an android tablet coming soon and will be looking for a good pdf reading/annotating experience.

* When you download a marked up pdf file, it would be awesome if the notes could be included (possibly by shrinking the original document a bit. (or are the currently included and evince is failing to show them?)

* Syncing all of a users docs/annotations with Dropbox would be a killer feature. I really like this trend towards apps using Dropbox as user-owned cloud storage. (Dropbox isn't perfect for this, but is pretty nice).

* A bit more esoteric: many of the documents I read are two-column. It would be amazing if crocodoc could show just one column at a time to provide bigger text and more room for annotation. I've toyed with putting together some simple tools to display pdfs in this way, but never had the gumption to make something that worked.

Anyways, I'll definitely be following crocodoc.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but Vuzit (http://www.vuzit.com) has been offering a similar service, including its own API for years.

Fair point as far as image-based document viewers are concerned. See response on this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2226889

EDIT: To clarify, I'm a co-founder of Crocodoc and answered the same question on a parallel thread (with a side by side comparison).

I've been a beta tester for a while now and I gotta say, these guys really listen to their users' feedback.

For me, I've use it to critique websites and essays. The annotations are great. I've also used it simply just to load a large PDF 'cause it scrolls through it faster (35MB limit).

Congrats Crocodoc Team!

I'm confused is this not what scribd does ?

I actually met one of the guys from crocodoc a couple of months ago, nice guy. The headline isn't very accurate. My understanding is that they let people annotate pdfs and share those annotations.

Yes, it's quite slick. I've been building a Ruby library for it and I'm using it as part of a conference management Web application.

The annotations part is really nice, makes it very handy for reviewing technical papers.

I've been using scribd for a pretty big Slide deck. It takes enough time to upload/convert on scribd that I usually go do something else while I wait for a new version to upload.

With Crocodoc it was fast enough that I didn't mind watching it process. My doc took about 1 minute for Crocodoc versus 7-10 for Scribd.

And they do HTML based rendering in PC browsers which I believe isn't done by Scribd yet. I think they have it going for Mobile Phones but not for PCs. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I like Scribd still I'm just impressed with what Crocodoc is doing. I haven't even gotten into their annotation system which is what they are most proud of.

I love this site for the name alone! The web app's intelligently designed and is the next evolution in digital documents.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocoduck

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