Pdf.js reached its first milestone | Hacker News Reader

Pdf.js reached its first milestone

blog.mozilla.com

119 pointsZeroGravitas10 comments

I like this project. I sometimes feel Chrome has a slight advantage because Google is also building really cool services, so they can get both sides in sync (e.g. returning WebP images in page previews, or encoding to WebM with Youtube).

By building things like Pdf.js and butter/popcorn.js and giving them away for other projects to use Mozilla gets to have the same impact and feedback loop, which helps to further their mission to improve the web.

I must be doing something wrong, because I'm getting fairly shitty rendering. I'm on FF5, Ubuntu 10.04. Anyone else have problems viewing their demo paper?

Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/hESRv

The article mentions that pdf.js uses some new Firefox features. It should work correctly in FF7 (nightly) and not FF5 (stable).

"We said above that pdf.js renders the Tracemonkey paper perfectly … if you’re running a Firefox nightly. On a Windows 7 machine where Firefox can use Direct2D and DirectWrite. If you ignore what appears to be a bug in DirectWrite’s font hinting. The paper is rendered less well on other platforms and in older FIrefoxen, and even worse in other browsers"

Yeah, it seems to be a Linux thing; Andreas was explaining that the font-rendering is highly platform-dependent.

This is pretty cool! Theres a pretty interesting feature in the pdf standard that few viewers support is embedded animations driven by javascript. As far as I know, only adobe properly supports it, bu there are some nice visualization tools such as pgf/tikz which allow for producing such visuals.

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/animations/

This is awesome. Anything to streamline the UX and eliminate the overt loading of a separate application is terrific. Hopefully Mozilla can continue to innovate and push Google on the browser front.

I am surprised by this point of view. It seems to me that extending the web-browser UI to display complex non-web-page documents is a bad idea, that it makes the user experience more complicated and mysterious.

Most of the time, the user-experience problem with PDFs on the web isn't that a separate app has to be started to read the PDF, but that the information in question is in a PDF at all, when a simple HTML page is generally safer and more useful.

If it understands PDF bookmarks, I'd default to Firefox for PDFs

Doesn't look good on Chrome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com