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Comment by pasbesoin | Hacker News Reader

What I find ironic is that, in every story about this that I've looked at so far, the draft documents -- if provided at all -- are provided in some kind of hosted file viewer. The first instance I saw used Scribd; this uses something else.

I feel this is a legitimate circumstance for the use of "WTF". Is a simple PDF or other format of linked document beyond us, now?

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But PDFs aren't cloud. Don't you like the cloud?

Please, I get enough cloud from my clients.

You can download the documents directly from scribd or dockstok (sp?). Most of us just want to read them w/o DLing the whole frickin file. Do you have any counter points to actually refute the claims in the post? I'd be interested to here about them rather than a document embedding trend that you disagree with.

The PDF file was 720 KB. The Scribd reader page was 3.1 MB (800+KB of JavaScript alone). So the PDF would actually load quicker than the cloud reader.

It takes so long for Adobe to load etc., Then once it loads you have to zoom out, scroll between pages instead of clicking between them, etc. The trend of viewing pdfs in scribd is a good one from my perspective.

Ah, I've never had that problem since both Chrome and Safari have native PDF renderers that load instantly.

And Scribd just sent me 10(ten) e-mails since I had the audacity to log in using Facebook and it decided to go all social on me and add all my friends one by one. No thanks.

I'm sorry to laugh, but that is truly funny. I've never registered out of fear of that exact scenario. I hope you can get thse folks out of your hair :)

Get rid of Adobe reader and use a real PDF reader, then.

Using scribd because some of your readers use Adobe Reader is the same kind of shortsighted non-solution as not using CSS2 because some of your readers use IE6: It makes things worse for anybody who uses Chrome, Safari, Foxit Reader or some other lightweight PDF plugin, or OS X which has Preview.app.

Instead, you should just offer the PDF for download, and alongside it include links to some of the alternatives than can permanently relieve you of Adobe Reader.

@ryankearney i'm using whatever standard plugin comes with firefox. i'm open to suggestions if there's a better way (with firefox)

Guess you don't use Chrome's built-in PDF reader, or any other reader for that matter. Loading up Adobe Reader to view a simple PDF is like using Microsoft Word to open a txt file.

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