Comment by X4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by X4 | Hacker News Reader

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PDF.js is really nice and awesome, but for me it doesn't work for documents with a file size of 11MB. It was a catalogue and to finally get the thing to render faster I used pdf2htmlEX (html5) which slimmed the 11MB file down to about 2MB with no visible quality loss and text would still be perfectly selectable, even in old and crappy browsers like IE7. I'm happily using both on a customers site. The 11MB file rendered good enough on my Client's new PC, but they have an i7 ;) My own box is really slow :/ (saving for a macbook pro)

Currently I was about to write a service to autoconvert PDF documents uploaded via ownCloud into the said HTML5 document, but it seems that even though I've ssh, this server is managed and doesn't come with make and also has no poppler or fontforge libraries available. Meh :(

I'm thinking about compiling the binary with --prefix=~/.local/lib and copy the dependencies I've found to that directory on the server. Hope that works, otherwise I'll need to write an API for pdf2htmlEX on a server where I've root and upload modified & new pdf files to it, then wait for it to finish the html5 conversion and download the files to the right directory using curl. That'd be much more work than just dropping the binary onto the server and executing the service as cronjob for modfied or new files.

Any ideas on howto solve this cleverly?

You should probably report this. Most of the test cases that they used where PDF.js is too slow, involves files so large that even Adobe Reader can't render quickly, or files that are heavily damaged.

I've reported it and uploaded the pdf, so someone on IRC responsible could debug it, but we didn't get far enough to fix it. Otherwise I wouldn't just add another PDF Viewer to a site. But it's only the downloads section and the preview there really is not for reading, but looking if it's the right document. Anyway, thanks for caring for the project. There's a reason Mozilla chose PDF.js over writing it in C++ and that's not just because of security I think.

Filesize has nothing to do with speed most of the time ... Try the PDF Reference document [1], it's pretty fast.

The project is very active: in the three month that we investigated it, many of the pdfs that were unusable (e.g. NASAs budget report, one of the worst written PDFs I have seen so far) when we started are now fast enough. Also almost all the effort that Opera puts into the project is about performance.

I suggest you check the file again in PDF.js and report the PDF so somebody can look at it.

[1] http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdf...

I used the latest version from git and also stable releases. It would take about 3min to render (for this 11MB file only, all other pdfs, albeit smaller, load fast). It was the only PDF that was slow, all others were loaded almost instantly, however the other files were much slower too.

Here is telemetry data from beta users about size of PDFs http://telemetry.mozilla.org/#beta/29/PDF_VIEWER_DOCUMENT_SI... -- typical PDF size is about 200KB, and 11MB is less 20% of them.

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