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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Which is funny, because I absolutely loathe opening in the browser, I prefer saving it.

Chrome and FF PDF viewers are better, but with Acrobat it was a bag of hurt.

Also, see: saving is the more generic answer. Save and you can see it, open it and before the Chrome 'save' button you had to re-download it.

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"Before the Chrome save button"? What does that even mean? Half the time I see people praising Chrome it's because of something thoroughly mundane, like an address bar, or saving files, or links. Did you guys browse the web using potatoes before you got Chrome, or what?

It means Chrome comes with a built-in pdf reader that, when you decide to save the file you're looking at, does not re-download it. This is significant when dealing with large files, and not a feature present in all competing products.

However, I would recommend re-downloading any pdf files instead of saving them from Chrome's reader, since I've encountered a couple that Chrome corrupted upon saving.

It seems kind of silly that certain browsers download it again. Isn't it stored as temp data somewhere? They should only have to rename it.

I'm actually happy with the way Chrome handles downloads in that it starts the download before you confirm if you want it, then deletes it should you decide you don't. It's cool clicking the "Download" link, navigating to the folder, renaming the file, and seeing the download is almost done.

Netscape (IIRC) would do another GET (or POST!?) when doing a view-source, which NEVER EVER made sense to anyone I would demonstrate it it. I want to see the source of the page that's currently rendered, not the source of another POST request. That behaviour thankfully seems not to be present in any modern browsers.

I may be misremembering, but didn't NN also re-GET on RESIZE EVENTS? I'm sure there was a very clever reason for doing so, but it sure did piss me off at the time.

I agree that the Acrobat plugin was a pain (and I always made sure to disable it in Firefox), but I absolutely love the Firefox in-browser PDF viewer. It doesn't lock up the PC while loading, and it has a convenient download button that doesn't seem to redownload the PDF when clicked (much like saving an already loaded image).

It might have something to do with my PC (i7 x220) but I cannot stand the Firefox viewer for anything but plain text. I find it very lacking in terms of performance compared to a native pdf viewer. Everytime a somewhat complex pdf opens up (mostly formulas, few images), the fan begins to rev up significantly..

Firefox's reader is an improvement over Adobe's, sure, but that's like beating snail in a foot race. Go Firefox, you show'em Chrome! It's still not SumatraPDF, it's not Evince. Saving the file and having it auto-open these programs takes less time then waiting for the browsers PDF readers to kick in. Of course it could be better, but frankly, I'd rather things be more unix'y, not less.

A major problem with saving all pdf files to be opened in a separate program is having to delete the temporary files afterwards. That's not very unix-y.

Another, less common, problem is erasing the URL in the process.

> having to delete the temporary files afterwards

If you select "Open with..." instead of saving it, you don't have to. Honestly though I often find myself wishing I'd saved a copy later.

There are other readers in Windows (besides Window's 8 built in metro (full-screen) reader). Ever hear of Foxit http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/ ? Mush much faster than Adobe Arobat.

It's funny how many Windows users seem to think the PDF format is intrinsically slow, and all because of Acrobat Reader. Safari on OS X renders a PDF just as quickly as any other webpage, and always has.

I imagine if you were to test that then the PDF rendering would actually be significantly faster than HTML, since OS X's rendering is all PostScript under the covers.

Have no fear, the Chrome PDF plugin has brought all that slowness back. Joy.

So does Chrome on Windows. Why so much love for Windows users?

On Windows I've yet to see any PDF viewer that's faster or better than Sumatra. All the in-browser ones are a bit slow and lacking in features.

But it's so ... yellow.

I was kidding, jeez. I'm a big fan of SumatraPDF and use it everywhere I can.

However I have actually heard people complain about its yellowness when started without a document. I don't care Sumatra, keep it yellow.

Seriously though, why all the yellow?

"Shug" I use Okular everywhere.

I've been using Sumatra for a long time, but it's been supplanted by Firefox in most cases recently. Sumatra is great and lightweight though, and it uses a robust and open source rendering and parsing engine.

Try PDF-XChange Viewer.

Too bad the font rendering quality is a little subpar compard to the other pdf viewers.

Yellow is not an issue: https://code.google.com/p/sumatrapdf/wiki/CommandLineArgumen...

I'm quite fond of muPDF, although it definitely leans towards the minimalist.

If Chrome didn't offer any way to 'save as' a PDF that it was displaying (really?!?), that's clearly Chrome's problem.

there are at least 3 ways to save an opened pdf with chromes viewer.

Unless it comes from one of a number of journal or research sites, where at least one of those options will no longer work.

That's cause you aren't actually looking at a PDF, most likely. If you are actually looking at a PDF in Chrome's renderer you will definitely be able to save it.

I'd also rather download and open in Sumatra but this is a handy feature I wasn't aware of. Opening the link in a new tab will not force the download (Chrome) unlike changing headers and masquerading the file as an application.

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