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Anecdotally, PDF.js is slow compared to native viewers and often renders documents incorrectly. And the project is five years old now. It's not bad as a fallbac
by fdej 10y ago
Anecdotally, PDF.js is slow compared to native viewers and often renders documents incorrectly. And the project is five years old now. It's not bad as a fallback, but considering how important PDF files are, looking for a better solution makes sense.
- eridius 10y agoAgreed. As an OS X user, I hate it any time a browser or website uses something like PDF.js instead of the native PDF support. The native PDF support in OS X is fast and excellent.
- dmix 10y ago> instead of the native PDF support You mean instead of just downloading the file? Or does Preview support opening PDF links.
- eridius 10y agoSafari will display PDFs natively without requiring you to download it to disk.
- hellofunk 10y agoAnd on iOS too!
- the_watcher 10y agoPreview does support opening PDF links.
- bluedino 10y agoWhile convienent, I can't see how anyone would want to use a browser-based PDF viewer over a native one.
- scrollaway 10y agoConvenience is exactly it. Have to admit I find it pretty damn useful myself, even though I believe PDFs to be completely out of scope of a web browser. I really wish the format would disappear. Everybody says it's useful at being a "perfect digital representation of what things look like on paper", which is certainly super useful for printing. But I cannot understand how so much information that should simply be distributed in either HTML (forms), epub (ebooks) or jpg/png (scans and digital images) is distributed over PDF, a pain-in-the-arse, overengineered format whose readers are always extremely slow and riddled with security issues and from which it's extremely hard to extract source data.
- Sanddancer 10y agoThere are a number of places where PDF has advantages that HTML, etc can't match. For forms, the PDF spec has electronic signatures, which means that you can sign legal documents without having to find a fax machine, or mail things back and forth. For print documents, it can do things like multiple column text in a sensible manner, across page breaks. As a general document format, it allows you to actually describe paper sizes, etc, so you can email someone a document that looks like it will when it's finalized. For archival, it means you can, without a bunch of hacks, create searchable documents of old, scanned in content. So things like electronics datasheets are searchable, and still retain the formatting of the originals. PDF continues to exist because there are so very many places that the alternatives are an even bigger pain in the ass, fix those, and then you can start to get rid of pdf.
- scrollaway 10y agoAll sensible uses of PDF (except your first one; electronic signatures are ridiculous, but let's not get into that). I'm talking about where pdf is used and shouldn't be.
- agumonkey 10y agoPDF.js sole purpose is to be non native. I don't want to rely on native existence of a safe enough, fast enough PDF renderer. PDF.js provides just that.
- jahewson 10y agoThen they should make PDF.js faster! The way it uses a canvas could be significantly improved. I guess the point is that they don't want to invest the engineering resources to do that, which is a shame but I understand the reasoning.
- euske 10y agoMy work machine is now completely Adobe-free. thanks to PDF.js. I hope they keep this project afloat.