The Trouble with PDFs

codinghorror.com

8 points·iamelgringo··7 comments

I hate PDFs.

Idea for the "link to out-of-browser"-problem: couldn't scribd offer a kind of hotlink to display PDF-documents from the web in their viewer? That is, instead of linking to http://wherever.com/mystupid.pdf, one could link to scribd.com/show?url=http://wherever.com/mystupid.pdf

Would something like that be legal, or would it make scribd suable for stealing content?

I'm actually working on writing something like that. If anyone is interested in helping me test it out/write it, shoot me an email--[my username] at eecs.harvard.edu .

I think this is a great idea. I hope scribd people hear you...

We do :)

This would be a great feature, guys! Unfortunately the conversion process takes a bit of time, and depending on the processing queue typically means that slurped documents aren't immediately available for viewing.

There is, however, a Firefox plug-in to make slurping your documents a bit easier. We don't support the plug-in since it wasn't developed by Scribd, but it can be found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5103

Scribd already has it, except show is called slurp.

I just looked it up, but it doesn't seem to be quite the same thing? At least slurp seems to involve uploading the document to Scribd, which might really be a copyright problem.

I meant a way to use scribd as a PDF reader directly. But mabye there really is no point to it, because if the publisher of a PDF would use it, they would already know about scribd, and therefore would probably be better off hosting the PDF on scribd to begin with. Perhaps it would be useful for other people who want to link to the PDF, though.

Here's some info on slurp:

http://www.scribd.com/upload/slurp_explanation

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