5 ms·

Love it, but unlike Chrome's embedded PDF reader, it can't "stream" PDFs (a dealbreaker for people viewing media-heavy PDFs on slower connections)

• baudehlo 14y ago
  That's interesting, because PDFs are an inherently un-streamable format. It requires seeking within the file to work (hence why command line PDF tools can't take STDIN for the PDF file - or they fake it by copying to a temp file first). I wonder how google got around that problem.
  • jevinskie 14y ago
    You could try to progressively render the file, pausing when a required forward reference isn't within the data you have downloaded so far.
    • jammmuel 14y ago
      That seems to be what they do, in my experience.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  • benatkin 14y ago
    engineers gonna engineer
  • hackmiester 14y ago
    Well, I imagine that they download the file in the background, and if the viewer seeks to a non-downloaded part of the file, then it just blocks with "Loading" until that part is downloaded.
  • dunham 14y ago
    "Linearized" PDFs have extra info up front to allow streaming and random access (via range requests).
  • jlarocco 14y ago
    Actually, PDF files can be optimized for streaming: http://acroeng.adobe.com/wp/?page_id=27 http://acroeng.adobe.com/wp/?page_id=27 It's covered in Annex F of the PDF spec: https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/pdf...
  • fafner 14y ago
    If I remember correctly the PDF Spec says the files should be read backwards. The object table is at the end of the file.
• brendandahl 14y ago
  We're working on that https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/pull/2719 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/pull/2719