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Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

Also unreadable where i work where scribd is basically useless. Would be nice if people linked to pdfs instead of scribd.

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Has scribd been useful anywhere?

I have found copies of ridiculously priced textbooks there, but the pain to search through them almost outweighs their free-ness.

Hear hear, I dont understand why people do it either, it just seems like all it adds is pagination and embedding for their pdf document which already has readers custom built for the task?

If you want to make something for presentation on the web dont make a pdf.

PDF is excellent for presenting information on the web, but sribd certainly sucks.

"PDF is excellent for presenting information on the web"

Except when you want to link to somewhere in the middle of it, or view it on a resource-constrained device, or reflow the text to a window size of your own choosing, or or or...

More here: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consumpt...

You can actually embed fragment identifiers inside PDFs, but I don't know if any web browsers can understand them. Your other points are of course known to everybody - I even know these things myself, and yet I maintain that "PDF is excellent for presenting information on the web". Especially PDFs designed for delivery on the web, rather than 20 MB files designed for printing. HTML solves problems, like reflow, that are unsolved by PDF, but PDF is still the best choice if precise control over typography and layout are needed, as they are for some documents. The article you link to was right on target in 2003, when it appeared, but is obsolete now. Browsers no longer crash when asked to render a PDF; no external readers are needed, if you use the right browser. In Chrome I can navigate into and out of PDF documents completely seemlessly; if used carefully they can be an integral part of the web.

I could have sworn they invented web pages for that.

same here. was looking forward to read but scribd is blocked at where I am

When someone submits a PDF to HN it'll be automatically changed to a scribd link, so that's why you see so many scribd links to HN.

I know that doesn't help with this particular article.

Why? And what if the pdf doesn't exist on scribd?

Why? Was Scribd an Ycombinator company? Is pg the devil?

Yes, and no; because once upon a time (when the decision was made) it was really painful to hit a PDF, because you'd wake the memory-hogging, task-bar infesting beast that Firefox wanted to open PDFs with.

I think a scribd link gets added to the end rather than substituted for the entire link?

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