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Comment by davrosthedalek | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather read a well set, two-column PDF online than having to deal with pop-ups, ads, dark patterns, javascript problems etc.

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2-column PDFs are fine when printed, or on a tall full-size screen. But on a 16:9 screen, smartphone, or small tablet they're annoying, since you have to zoom in to read the text and then do a weird diagonal scroll between columns every page. For all of these cases single-column half-width with twice as many pages would generally be better.

I have an ultra-wide. I open the window on half of the screen, and can work on the other half. Very convenient.

But I get your point. PDF are not optimal for sure. And personal mileage may vary, I'm very sensitive to having proper text spacing and so on.

If there were lots of people like you, soon there'd be publishers inventing the "ad background", the "ad paragraph" and the "cookie consent cover page"

Are those the only two options?

Seems like that's more and more the case nowadays.

One of the things I absolutely despise about the rise of JS is that many many modern sites won't display anything (just the white BG) unless I allow 3rd party scripts. Is displaying simple blogposts and other textual information with the occasional image or video embed so hard that one needs to load often multiple MBs of JS from multiple external sites?

It's infuriating.

Pretty sure you can embed javascript in a PDF document, actually.

Yep, but as far as I know, only works with Acrobat Reader. No other reader I tried supports it. Would be nice for presentations.

AFAIK at least these support JS: MuPDF, Okular, PDF-XChange, Foxit Reader, PDFium.

I'm pretty sure that at least Okular does not support enough to make the animation with the latex animate package work. But maybe I held it wrong. I'm pretty sure I also tried Foxit and MuPDF for the same thing.

I'll have another look. While I despise frame transition animations etc, for some stuff some nice animations are really helpful in explaining concepts.

https://texample.net/media/tikz/examples/PDF/wankel-motor.pd... works for me in Okular 1.10.3.

Thanks! Nice, works with my okular 1.9.3 too, after asking whether it should show forms. The PDF-X I have on windows asks also (I think they use the same engine, poppler?), but then shows a blue rectangle if I enable them. I'm pretty sure that was what my experience was generally when I looked at it the last time (2 years ago), so probably some updates in the engine which made it work now.

You can also (and really ought to) switch off the JavaScript engine completely in Acrobat reader. There isn't a legitimate reason to run Javascript during the viewing of a PDF.

Give me a link... I might visit it in a browser.

> There isn't a legitimate reason to run Javascript during the viewing of a PDF.

I have a book, and I'd like to display video clips. AIUI, that requires that the viewer has JS.

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