Show HN: Pdf.js-based real-time collaborative viewer for Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pdf.js-based real-time collaborative viewer for Chrome

chrome.google.com

61 pointsjordanthoms25 comments

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Classy!

Form aside, this looks like a very interesting product, as others I wanted to work on something similar too. Good luck!

... this is what happens when you finally get something working at 6am :)

What is the benefit of creating a web app that only works in 1 particular browser? Or is this not a web app?

The extension is currently only available for Chrome, but all the functionality is available at http://web.notabledocs.com/web/viewer.html - If you share your document, that's what the other people get. We actually work offline (including making comments) if you install the extension.

Cool stuff! Something I've been thinking about too. Open Source?

Not right now, but it's something we're considering - we certainly owe a lot to Mozilla's PDF.js, which is doing the PDF rendering for us. It's just tricky to decide to give away the code when you don't yet know what part of your startup is (hopefully) going to be valuable.

It's a browser extension, but the benefit of web apps in general is portability. This one has the advantage (from the looks of it) of solving a very hard problem, that of being able to view and manipulate pdf files. AFAIK there is no other easy and free way to do this in Linux, for one.

edit: It doesn't appear to let you edit a pdf, just annotate. Which is still incredibly useful to be able to do alone or collaboratively.

This is EXACTLY the product I wanted to make, thanks!

I think a use case for which you could sell it is collaborative class note-taking. My teachers distribute PDFs of their lecture slides before class which students use to take notes on (so that they don't have to recreate figures, etc). I have always thought it would be great for this PDF-markup process to take place live in some sort of Google Doc interface. This looks like the best solution I have seen so far!

If you really wanted to run with the student use case, you could then allow students to publicly/privately organize the annotated notes by class and lecture slot so that other people could benefit from the notes.

We actually made that product first! - http://www.notable.ac is similar, but made specifically for students, documents are organized by course and notes can be made public/private/shared with friends.

It does take a bit more work to setup, because you have to upload the documents to the site first (we process them into images on the server, and support Word/Powerpoint as well as PDF).

We had trouble getting traction in the education space - So we built the Chrome version, which works much better for single documents and for uses outside education. But we're still keeping notable.ac running so feel free to give it a try.

We are working on open source project, quite similar to this: http://peerlibrary.org/

https://github.com/peerlibrary/peerlibrary

its kinda "funny" how pdf.js is used for Chrome in a way that only works with chrome. (given that it comes from firefox)

thanks for walled gardens google!

Huh? How so?

This app caused me a lot of trouble. I tried to save some PDFs and they were impossible to open in any reader. I opened them with Notepad++ and they were now HTML files. Also, there is security issue of giving full access to your PDF downloads away. Sometimes financial institutions generate PDFs with account and identiy information; this app by default doesn't ask you if you want to give it to them, it just automatically does so.

I like the concept and hope to download a future iteration. Just some feedback.

Sorry you had trouble with saving PDFs - I'll look into it and see if we have a bug there.

We don't actually upload the PDFs to our servers unless you explicitly use our 'share' function. This is something we consider critical to the product, for the privacy reasons you mentioned. We do send a fingerprint of the document to our servers to check if anybody has added comments to it. (The comments you make are saved to our servers however).

Hope this answers some of your concerns, feel free to email us at support@notabledocs.com if you have any other feedback

We have an extension (for chrome) and a bookmarklet (and ipad app) that use pdf.js to add comments to pdfs and save specific pages from pdfs. The extension and bookmarklet allow commenting on any page that can be rendered on a web page (including Pdfs!). We are now targeting it for education. Will love feedback (provided our site doesn't crash) http://www.surfmark.com

Hah, the layout is almost exactly like a thing I'd developed last year: comment threads on the right, callouts into the document on the left.

Pretty cool--if anyone's interested, I'll try to get the source code released.

Yes. Would be a great starter for a project I am working on.

Can this app be an item in the "chrome://apps/" page, and use my google credentials for logging in? Or some form of OpenID?

We're working on adding Google Login at the moment. You can install the App version from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notable-docs/iljoj... , although it doesn't support offline at the moment.

pdf.js is great. we used it at surfly to implement purely web-based collaborative pdf viewer that works on any modern browser.

Actual project link (OP just goes to Chrome/NSA app store): http://notabledocs.com/

The listing on the Chrome store is more up to date, so I linked to that - but the landing page works too :)

Very useful!

How long take to make it? How many persons are in your team? Is it a kind of side project?

The MVP took about a month, and probably 3 months to polish. Working full time with 2 hackers, hipster and a hustler.

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