17 ms·

PDFy – Instant PDF Host

244 points by ridgewell 12y ago

mgkimsal 12y ago
"...much like Imgur does for images. PDFy is free, ad-free, and non-commercial." They must be using a different imgur than I use, because it's definitely commercial and has ads. I can't see pdfy surviving on donations indefinitely.
- ridgewell 12y ago
  It's been running since May and is hosted on rather cheap servers (Ramnode) which limits the amount of funds that actually need to be expended to run such a service like this. At the moment, the project is rather small and doesn't require expensive dedicated servers.
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  I probably should've worded that better, but that text will be changed/moved/removed in the near future anyway. The Imgur comparison really only refers to the upload/sharing process, not the non-commercial bit. As for running off donations, I've addressed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034529
  - dylz 12y ago
    imo the worst part is that imgur doesn't even permit direct linking in many cases: they will 3xx-force redirect direct links to their ad filled pages
    - BorisMelnik 12y ago
      yikes I did not know that. I generally link directly to the imgur image itself and bypass the image page. will be on the lookout for this.
      - dylz 12y ago
        Linking to the direct imgur image itself will trigger 3xx to the image page if a few conditions are met - referrer (is popular site), enough hits to the image (popular images trigger 3xxs), some weird cookies. It's incredibly misleading and awful. Also, try uploading an image - you might notice that the "direct link to image" textbox on the right bar no longer exists, and hasn't existed in a very long time. Check this out in term: $ curl -I -H 'Referer: http://twitter.com/' 'http://i.imgur.com/ZKfUroW.png'
        vertex-four 12y ago
        I just uploaded a random pic, and I definitely see the "direct link to image" box.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        dylz 12y ago
        Are you logged in? http://i.imgur.com/7k3si8M.png http://i.imgur.com/7k3si8M.png
        vertex-four 12y ago
        Yes, I am logged in.
        Already__Taken 12y ago
        Imgur does a lot of weird things like that from growing up to be just for reddit onto being a huge entity on its own. Maybe they're using ads to help pay for the site from sources that can afford their own image hosting anyway like twitter.
alialkhatib 12y ago
I'm skeptical about the longevity of a site that operates entirely on donations, but seeing that you offer the source code for free (and it runs on PHP, which is arguably pretty well-supported), and your license is reasonable (if crass, but who cares?)... This is really great. Thanks for posting this.
- lumpypua 12y ago
  Having licensed a small project or two under the WTFPL, it is delightfully permissive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  Hi, PDFy owner here. I've been running a number of services for 3 years now, without running into financial problems (see http://cryto.net/ http://cryto.net/, http://cryto.net/~joepie91 http://cryto.net/~joepie91, http://cryto.net/~joepie91/projectlist http://cryto.net/~joepie91/projectlist). My biggest issue has actually been lack of time, rather than money :) I've gotten pretty good over the years at running stuff on a shoestring budget (my current hosting expenses are around 100 euro a month for everything together at a large number of hosts, and I have plenty of resources to spare), and as far as I can predict PDFy won't be running into any issues any time soon. I should add that it definitely helps to custom-develop everything - generic solutions tend to come with a large amount of (resource) overhead, which make it harder to run it on a small budget. By doing just about everything custom, the overhead is minimal. Traffic is dirt cheap nowadays if you know where to look, so that's not really a concern anymore either.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    hey -- I just loaded the page and I'm guessing 1/2 of the docs on the front page where copyrighted and uploaded w/o perms. I could be wrong. In either case, you probably want to get very acquainted w/ the dmca and register an agent [1]; hopefully you know all about this but it's worth running requirements to stay w/in the dmca past a lawyer [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101028/15533611640/damn-good-reminder-if-you-run-a-blog-register-for-dmca-protections.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101028/15533611640/damn-...
nkw 12y ago
This is really great. Scribd can suck it. Also props for mirroring to the Internet archive.
lnanek2 12y ago
Wow, love this so much more than Scribd. Already clicked on the latest uploads and found something cool, and it just worked and didn't require login. Amazing.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
fiatjaf 12y ago
Well, someone could scrape all these PDF links and index them in a search engine, then Scribd could suck it. Or will Google do it automatically?
- JeremyBanks 12y ago
  Google has indexed PDF contents since 2001[1]. [1]: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067225/Google-Does-PDF-Other-Changes http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067225/Google-Does-PDF...
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  The gallery is intentionally plain HTML; Google appears to be indexing all public documents on PDFy correctly (both viewer pages and actual PDF files). Unlisted documents get a noindex tag. That said, I really need to write some code to extract the document metadata from the PDF files and display it on page; right now, the only thing that search engines (and the site itself) have to go off is the filename, which is far from optimal.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Ideally, metadata extraction would be done on upload and presented to the user for optional manual correction. This would be a major contribution to findability, because PDFs often have incorrect metadata (try searching for anything on archive.org) or the person uploading may have metadata relevant to a use case that is unforeseen by the document creator. In fact, the same file could be uploaded multiple times with different metadata. There's room here for experimentation, e.g. publishing content hashes and linking "duplicates" that have different metadata. If PDF metadata can be published in a structured format, it should be then be possible for Calibre or Docear / Zotero to import the PDF + JSON metadata directly into the document database.
    - joepie91_ 12y ago
      The problem is that I don't want to add any more roadblocks to the upload process - it should be as 'instant' as possible. Even the 'public' vs. 'unlisted' selection took quite some consideration. Perhaps crowdsourcing metadata might be an idea - but that involves quite a bit more complexity, implementation-wise.
codezero 12y ago
This looks great, but I hope you have a solid system in place to deal with the huge number of DMCA requests you'll get. Free PDF hosting services (free file hosting services) end up being a target of pirates, but not just that, of automated systems that index things specific to pirated text in order to get clicks. If you don't get way ahead of these kinds of users, you'll end up with an untenable drain on your resources that will make it easier to shut down than to sustain.
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  I'm just going to wait and see how things go. I generally improvise; there's not really much prior work (let alone documentation) on the way I run projects, so it's mostly just a matter of figuring stuff out as I go along. One thing that's certain is that I have no intention of shutting down the service. I've run stuff that attracted more abuse :) I have no intention of acting as a 'shield' against DMCA requests for this particular service (if they're valid, they'll be followed up on, as described on the TOS page), so ideally there shouldn't really be a problem. We'll see how it goes.
  - codezero 12y ago
    Yep, all I am suggesting is that you be prepared to deal with things in as automated a way as possible, like blacklisting naughty IP ranges, automating DMCA take-downs, fingerprinting known bad content and dropping it into a black hole etc...
sillysaurus3 12y ago
Could we please stop hating on Scribd? In addition to being rude, it's also mistaken: I've found PDFs on Scribd that simply aren't available anywhere else, because the original links on other sites became broken. This is somewhat common for academic papers, for example. Yes, I had to upload a PDF in order to download the PDF from Scribd, but that's a fair trade; I chose to upload an academic paper that perhaps might be useful to someone else.
- Camillo 12y ago
  When you have a horrible, user-hostile service, being the only place to find something only tends to make people hate you more.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Which is better: not being able to find something at all, or having to jump through a hoop to download it? I thought HN was objective. Maybe that's changing.
    - girvo 12y ago
      > I thought HN was objective. Maybe that's changing. No, I don't think so, I just think a lot of people here disagree with you in your judgement of Scribd. Hopefully this service can have the utility of Scribd as you've described and keep it's lovely usability.
      - sillysaurus3 12y ago
        The lack of response to my point that Scribd has content not found anywhere else is the most telling. Objectively, it seems like that point should win the debate. The disagreement is therefore subjective. I wouldn't quite call this "tribalism," but perhaps it's one step short. In the old days of HN, a valid point wouldn't simply be dismissed without a response. The fact that no one is stepping up to point out why I'm mistaken is suggestive; if it continues to happen, then it's indicative of a trend. And over the last year I've seen this happen to others somewhat frequently.
Pistos2 12y ago
@joepie91_: Just FYI, documents do not load until you accept the site's cookies. I don't know of a technical reason why this should be, off the top of my head, so if there isn't one, you may consider removing that restriction/requirement.
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  I suspect that might be caused by pdf.js. While PDFy itself will attempt to send you a cookie (even if you just try to download the PDF), it should still work even if the cookie is rejected, as it's not dependent on it for serving the file. Can you tell me what the name of the offending cookie is?
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    Works fine without accepting cookies in Opera 12. Needs JS and iframes enabled.
    - Pistos2 12y ago
      In my case, Chromium 35.0.1916.153 .
  - Pistos2 12y ago
    Chromium reports that there are only two things being attempted by the site: a PHPSESSID cookie, and localStorage. I can't seem to make Chromium accept only one or the other, I can only make it "Allow" for the entire domain altogether, both cookie and localStorage. I have vague recollections about Chromium and/or Firefox confounding localStorage with cookies when it comes to allowing or denying.
bluthru 12y ago
Could you please move the top toolbar to the side to create one side panel? It's taking up a lot of real estate on laptop screens.
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  On smaller screens, it should automatically move the entire sidebar to be a (relatively thin) footer bar instead. I should probably make the top bar shrink in height at that point as well. I suspect you might be just slightly above the cut-off for the small-screen layout. EDIT: Here's a ticket: https://github.com/joepie91/pdfy/issues/13 https://github.com/joepie91/pdfy/issues/13
  - bluthru 12y ago
    What I'm describing is getting rid of the top bar and putting the logo in the side bar. Vertical screen real estate is precious.
BorisMelnik 12y ago
>"I got sick of documents getting locked up behind login walls of services like Scribd." Now thats a fantastic example of building a product around a real problem. If I even see domains like Scribd anymore I won't even give it a click. No, I don't want to sign up. I'd rather just do site:domain"thedoc.pdf" or some other way. I hope your product takes off and everyone uses it!
shire 12y ago
would be cool if we can edit pdf's
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  Editing of PDFs really is outside the scope of PDFy. There are quite a few PDF editors available elsewhere already, all of which will likely do the job better than PDFy ever could. Not to mention that editing of PDFs can be a somewhat painful experience :)
  - Hengjie 12y ago
    To build on that, here's a list of web PDF editors that are available: 1. NotablePDF (https://web.notablepdf.com https://web.notablepdf.com) 2. PDFZen (http://pdfzen.com http://pdfzen.com) 3. PDF Escape (https://www.pdfescape.com/ https://www.pdfescape.com/) 4. PDF Buddy (http://pdfbuddy.com http://pdfbuddy.com)
ThrustVectoring 12y ago
This looks like duplicated effort to me. Upload the pdf to Google Drive, set the permissions to "people with link can view", and share the link it gives you. Alternatively, there's a publish to web option - they're identical in this use case. I already do something similar on my portfolio page - I have a link that downloads a pdf version of my resume on Google Drive.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  This comment is almost identical to one posted when Dropbox first premiered on HN. They were saying Dropbox was duplicated effort. Interface matters a lot.
  - ThrustVectoring 12y ago
    That's a great point. The exact differences between the work flows: 1. Adds drag-and-drop to choose the file to upload 2. Cleaner permissions structure 3. The button is much bigger, and there's fewer options to do other things 4. Adds galleries to look at collections of PDF files 5. Exact same number (6) of mouse clicks to copy a link to a hosted pdf to clipboard 6. Removes log-in requirement (though to be fair, it's really easy to stay logged in to Google services) It seems to me to be a much smaller difference to the UI difference with Dropbox - the automatic mirroring and context menu actions are huge.
    - dingaling 12y ago
      > (though to be fair, it's really easy to stay logged in to Google services) Not particularly easy for the three-in-four Internet users who don't have any form of Google account, though...
  - jonpaul 12y ago
    Yup. I would have never thought about using Google drive to share PDF publicly. Now that I know, still not sure I would. You're damn right, interface does matter.
namespace 12y ago
Great work @joepie91_! I wish your service the very best and hope that would scale against the DMCA brigade.
hansy 12y ago
This is really sweet, but if I may, what's wrong with using existing solutions like Dropbox or Google Docs? Neither shows a paywall or login screen when accessing the shared links. Unless you don't use either service, which is totally valid.
- thomas4019 12y ago
  Dropbox and Google docs rarely if even show up in Google search results. Will PDFy submit lists of content to search engines or be easily crawlable?
  - joepie91_ 12y ago
    The gallery is plain HTML; all public documents are correctly (and quite rapidly, <1 day) indexed by Google. Unlisted documents get a noindex tag.
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  Both require accounts to upload files. EDIT: And both are more involved than just dragging and dropping a PDF.
Nux 12y ago
Very nice initiative! Good luck with it! I know this implies complexity, but I think it'd be nice if there was a comment feature for the PDFs, perhaps even something à la Soundcloud, i.e. per section comments. I'd love to find things such as my washing machine's manual improved by user experience through comments etc. :-D
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  I've actually been considering this. I'm not yet sure how to implement it, though - and while I'd love to have positional comments (perhaps 'annotations' would be a better term?), it'd require some significant modifications to the pdf.js viewer. Right now I'm quite swamped with stuff to do, but once I have some more free time I'll definitely be looking into this and some other enhancements that are currently sitting on the issue tracker.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Contact the author of this presentation, he wrote epub.js and could provide helpful advice. http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/slides/Hartnell.pdf http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/slides/Hartnell.pdf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xtj4LYBzRiw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xtj4LYBzRiw Related: http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/ http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/
  - oever 12y ago
    Annotation pdfs would be great. It's a feature we'd love to implement for viewerjs, easy pdf viewer for in js, too. http://viewerjs.org http://viewerjs.org.
  - Hengjie 12y ago
    Flick me an email hengjie (at) notablepdf.com, I think we could provide you with a viewer for free that has annotation features but also based on PDF.js so that you can easily switch it over.
- jordanthoms 12y ago
  We have that in Notable PDF ( http://notablepdf.com http://notablepdf.com ). We don't require that you host the file with us either - Files are fingerprinted, and comments can be made attached to that fingerprint (private by default, but can be made public to anyone who has the file). We're focusing on annotating documents within teams, schools, etc, but the public annotations to improve documents (à la rapgenius) is something we are thinking about. (We actually have the ability to share files with a link too)
jon4988 12y ago
I love it. But instead of "document.pdf" as the file name on download, what if you changed it to "[pdf title].pdf"? Several downloads in a row gets confusing
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  It should give you the original filename upon download, unless your browser ignores/mis-parses the Content-disposition header: https://github.com/joepie91/pdfy/blob/master/public_html/modules/download.php#L108 https://github.com/joepie91/pdfy/blob/master/public_html/mod... What browser are you using?
  - jon4988 12y ago
    Weird, it works now... Was in Chrome 35: http://imgur.com/RhRafJK http://imgur.com/RhRafJK Anyhow, thanks for putting together such a great site!
  - Hengjie 12y ago
    Were you letting users download it via PDF.js before which is why it was document.pdf? It makes sense to download it via PDF.js since the file is actually already loaded once the user renders it.
    - joepie91_ 12y ago
      Oh, that might actually be it. The 'download file' button in the pdf.js menu is a different button from the button at the bottom/right hand side of the page (with different code behind it - the pdf.js 'download' button comes stock with pdf.js). I haven't really tested its behaviour much, but it's quite possible that it's calling things document.pdf. Perhaps I should just remove the pdf.js 'download' button, seeing as there's one elsewhere in the UI anyway.
seesomesense 12y ago
Lots of copyrighted material there already. O'Reilley, Prentice Hall etc Get ready for a DCMA deluge.
diegolo 12y ago
Add comments on each pdf and it could become an important tool for (anonymously) reviewing papers
snowmaker 12y ago
Hello, I'm one of the founders of Scribd. You might be surprised to hear this, but I applaud the PDFy service and am glad someone has built it. Scribd is not designed to be a simple, lightweight way to host a PDF file. Yes, this was the original idea of Scribd 8 years ago, but we've long since left that path. We see that market as having been made irrelevant by a combination of Google Docs, Dropbox/Box.net/etc., and better PDF readers now built into browsers like Chrome. There may be room for someone to build an imgur like service for PDFs too, but that's not what we're doing. Scribd is really good for two things: 1) Scribd is a subscription reading service ("Netflix for books") where you can read over 400,000 professionally published books for $9 / month, including thousands of new releases and best-sellers. It doesn't include many programming books unfortunately (yet!), but if you like to read other things, it's a good deal. 2) Scribd is good for serious authors and publishers who want to publish a lot of content and organize it well. For example, the World Bank uploads thousands of research reports to Scribd and organizes them into collections. And many serious authors publish books and other writings with us. We're sorry that we haven't done a good enough of explaining who we are as it's changed over the years. And we're sorry if you've been frustrated trying to use Scribd for something it's not particularly good at. To joepie91_ - I think it's cool that you've started this. We have some experience building document hosting services, and I can see you are already encountering some issues we've worked on, like DMCA and copyright. If you'd like to talk, we'd be more than happy to help you out.
- zapu 12y ago
  Wow, I never knew. So far I've seen Scribd as very annoying pdf host, and most often I decide not to read the content at all when given a scribd link ("just send me the pdf, damn it!").
  - digitalengineer 12y ago
    Same here. But then again we're not the clients. We're just 'using' the technology Sribd provides their clients I suppose.
- multiplier 12y ago
  Scribd was synonymous with copyright violation for years. Nice to see you're finally making an honest business out of it.
seqizz 12y ago
A login might be useful. You know.. to check (or delete) what I've uploaded and see the stats later.
digitalengineer 12y ago
Great idea. Just one little tip: I would not use the combination 'Instant and PDF' in your communication. Instant PDF is a well known product by Enfocus. It's basically a check-app for Print-optimized PDF files. As such it's a world-wide standard designers are forced to use. Create PDF, run it through Instant PDF, if approved it will attach a flightcheck report to said PDF and newspapers, magazines, printers can process the file. The flightcheck searches for common mistakes (non-embedded fonts, rgb colors, low res photo's, etc). Recently the Instant PDF name got absorbed by Connect but the brand Instant PDF is quite powerfull really).
ourjs 12y ago
I saw some sexy contents, will you delete them?
- sarciszewski 12y ago
  Delete them? Hah
McGuffin 12y ago
Whoa, opened the site to a bunch of obvious nsfw stuff. Maybe there should be an option to filter this?
mhd 12y ago
This really needs NSFW tagging. Right now, the "latest public documents" is full of hentai. Doesn't mean that people will actually do that, but at least giving uploaders an option wouldn't hurt.
- juan_venter 12y ago
  Yeah, I just ran into the same problem ! Opened the site at work and had to close asap !
jonpaul 12y ago
This is awesome! But I can't see it surviving on donations. Commercialize it please so that it survives. Tasteful ads aren't so bad like what Reddit does or Carbon[something]... I'm just concerned you won't survive on donations.
- sarciszewski 12y ago
  Check this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034529 :)
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  I absolutely don't need to commercialize it to keep it running. In fact, commercialization would come with an entire set of issues (and cost factors) of its own. I have a solid track record of running non-commercial services :)
maximumoverload 12y ago
I don't want to sound negative, but when I look at the "latest public documents", most of them seem to be copyright infridgement. But good luck anyway.
heeton 12y ago
I also made NextPrev.it a little while ago with a friend. It gives you option to host a PDF and control which page the viewer sees, perfect for presentations or looking through contracts etc.
anonbanker 12y ago
Wait, is this the joepie91 that used to hang out on #anonops?

244 points by ridgewell 12y ago

"...much like Imgur does for images. PDFy is free, ad-free, and non-commercial." They must be using a different imgur than I use, because it's definitely commercial and has ads. I can't see pdfy surviving on donations indefinitely.

ridgewell 12y ago
It's been running since May and is hosted on rather cheap servers (Ramnode) which limits the amount of funds that actually need to be expended to run such a service like this. At the moment, the project is rather small and doesn't require expensive dedicated servers.
joepie91_ 12y ago
I probably should've worded that better, but that text will be changed/moved/removed in the near future anyway. The Imgur comparison really only refers to the upload/sharing process, not the non-commercial bit. As for running off donations, I've addressed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034529
- dylz 12y ago
  imo the worst part is that imgur doesn't even permit direct linking in many cases: they will 3xx-force redirect direct links to their ad filled pages
  - BorisMelnik 12y ago
    yikes I did not know that. I generally link directly to the imgur image itself and bypass the image page. will be on the lookout for this.
    - dylz 12y ago
      Linking to the direct imgur image itself will trigger 3xx to the image page if a few conditions are met - referrer (is popular site), enough hits to the image (popular images trigger 3xxs), some weird cookies. It's incredibly misleading and awful. Also, try uploading an image - you might notice that the "direct link to image" textbox on the right bar no longer exists, and hasn't existed in a very long time. Check this out in term: $ curl -I -H 'Referer: http://twitter.com/' 'http://i.imgur.com/ZKfUroW.png'
      - vertex-four 12y ago
        I just uploaded a random pic, and I definitely see the "direct link to image" box.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        dylz 12y ago
        Are you logged in? http://i.imgur.com/7k3si8M.png http://i.imgur.com/7k3si8M.png
        vertex-four 12y ago
        Yes, I am logged in.
      - Already__Taken 12y ago
        Imgur does a lot of weird things like that from growing up to be just for reddit onto being a huge entity on its own. Maybe they're using ads to help pay for the site from sources that can afford their own image hosting anyway like twitter.

alialkhatib 12y ago

I'm skeptical about the longevity of a site that operates entirely on donations, but seeing that you offer the source code for free (and it runs on PHP, which is arguably pretty well-supported), and your license is reasonable (if crass, but who cares?)... This is really great. Thanks for posting this.

lumpypua 12y ago
Having licensed a small project or two under the WTFPL, it is delightfully permissive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
joepie91_ 12y ago
Hi, PDFy owner here. I've been running a number of services for 3 years now, without running into financial problems (see http://cryto.net/ http://cryto.net/, http://cryto.net/~joepie91 http://cryto.net/~joepie91, http://cryto.net/~joepie91/projectlist http://cryto.net/~joepie91/projectlist). My biggest issue has actually been lack of time, rather than money :) I've gotten pretty good over the years at running stuff on a shoestring budget (my current hosting expenses are around 100 euro a month for everything together at a large number of hosts, and I have plenty of resources to spare), and as far as I can predict PDFy won't be running into any issues any time soon. I should add that it definitely helps to custom-develop everything - generic solutions tend to come with a large amount of (resource) overhead, which make it harder to run it on a small budget. By doing just about everything custom, the overhead is minimal. Traffic is dirt cheap nowadays if you know where to look, so that's not really a concern anymore either.
- x0x0 12y ago
  hey -- I just loaded the page and I'm guessing 1/2 of the docs on the front page where copyrighted and uploaded w/o perms. I could be wrong. In either case, you probably want to get very acquainted w/ the dmca and register an agent [1]; hopefully you know all about this but it's worth running requirements to stay w/in the dmca past a lawyer [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101028/15533611640/damn-good-reminder-if-you-run-a-blog-register-for-dmca-protections.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101028/15533611640/damn-...

nkw 12y ago

This is really great. Scribd can suck it. Also props for mirroring to the Internet archive.

lnanek2 12y ago

Wow, love this so much more than Scribd. Already clicked on the latest uploads and found something cool, and it just worked and didn't require login. Amazing.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

fiatjaf 12y ago

Well, someone could scrape all these PDF links and index them in a search engine, then Scribd could suck it. Or will Google do it automatically?

JeremyBanks 12y ago
Google has indexed PDF contents since 2001[1]. [1]: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067225/Google-Does-PDF-Other-Changes http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067225/Google-Does-PDF...
joepie91_ 12y ago
The gallery is intentionally plain HTML; Google appears to be indexing all public documents on PDFy correctly (both viewer pages and actual PDF files). Unlisted documents get a noindex tag. That said, I really need to write some code to extract the document metadata from the PDF files and display it on page; right now, the only thing that search engines (and the site itself) have to go off is the filename, which is far from optimal.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Ideally, metadata extraction would be done on upload and presented to the user for optional manual correction. This would be a major contribution to findability, because PDFs often have incorrect metadata (try searching for anything on archive.org) or the person uploading may have metadata relevant to a use case that is unforeseen by the document creator. In fact, the same file could be uploaded multiple times with different metadata. There's room here for experimentation, e.g. publishing content hashes and linking "duplicates" that have different metadata. If PDF metadata can be published in a structured format, it should be then be possible for Calibre or Docear / Zotero to import the PDF + JSON metadata directly into the document database.
  - joepie91_ 12y ago
    The problem is that I don't want to add any more roadblocks to the upload process - it should be as 'instant' as possible. Even the 'public' vs. 'unlisted' selection took quite some consideration. Perhaps crowdsourcing metadata might be an idea - but that involves quite a bit more complexity, implementation-wise.

codezero 12y ago

This looks great, but I hope you have a solid system in place to deal with the huge number of DMCA requests you'll get. Free PDF hosting services (free file hosting services) end up being a target of pirates, but not just that, of automated systems that index things specific to pirated text in order to get clicks. If you don't get way ahead of these kinds of users, you'll end up with an untenable drain on your resources that will make it easier to shut down than to sustain.

joepie91_ 12y ago
I'm just going to wait and see how things go. I generally improvise; there's not really much prior work (let alone documentation) on the way I run projects, so it's mostly just a matter of figuring stuff out as I go along. One thing that's certain is that I have no intention of shutting down the service. I've run stuff that attracted more abuse :) I have no intention of acting as a 'shield' against DMCA requests for this particular service (if they're valid, they'll be followed up on, as described on the TOS page), so ideally there shouldn't really be a problem. We'll see how it goes.
- codezero 12y ago
  Yep, all I am suggesting is that you be prepared to deal with things in as automated a way as possible, like blacklisting naughty IP ranges, automating DMCA take-downs, fingerprinting known bad content and dropping it into a black hole etc...

sillysaurus3 12y ago

Could we please stop hating on Scribd? In addition to being rude, it's also mistaken: I've found PDFs on Scribd that simply aren't available anywhere else, because the original links on other sites became broken. This is somewhat common for academic papers, for example. Yes, I had to upload a PDF in order to download the PDF from Scribd, but that's a fair trade; I chose to upload an academic paper that perhaps might be useful to someone else.

Camillo 12y ago
When you have a horrible, user-hostile service, being the only place to find something only tends to make people hate you more.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Which is better: not being able to find something at all, or having to jump through a hoop to download it? I thought HN was objective. Maybe that's changing.
  - girvo 12y ago
    > I thought HN was objective. Maybe that's changing. No, I don't think so, I just think a lot of people here disagree with you in your judgement of Scribd. Hopefully this service can have the utility of Scribd as you've described and keep it's lovely usability.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      The lack of response to my point that Scribd has content not found anywhere else is the most telling. Objectively, it seems like that point should win the debate. The disagreement is therefore subjective. I wouldn't quite call this "tribalism," but perhaps it's one step short. In the old days of HN, a valid point wouldn't simply be dismissed without a response. The fact that no one is stepping up to point out why I'm mistaken is suggestive; if it continues to happen, then it's indicative of a trend. And over the last year I've seen this happen to others somewhat frequently.

Pistos2 12y ago

@joepie91_: Just FYI, documents do not load until you accept the site's cookies. I don't know of a technical reason why this should be, off the top of my head, so if there isn't one, you may consider removing that restriction/requirement.

joepie91_ 12y ago
I suspect that might be caused by pdf.js. While PDFy itself will attempt to send you a cookie (even if you just try to download the PDF), it should still work even if the cookie is rejected, as it's not dependent on it for serving the file. Can you tell me what the name of the offending cookie is?
- aw3c2 12y ago
  Works fine without accepting cookies in Opera 12. Needs JS and iframes enabled.
  - Pistos2 12y ago
    In my case, Chromium 35.0.1916.153 .
- Pistos2 12y ago
  Chromium reports that there are only two things being attempted by the site: a PHPSESSID cookie, and localStorage. I can't seem to make Chromium accept only one or the other, I can only make it "Allow" for the entire domain altogether, both cookie and localStorage. I have vague recollections about Chromium and/or Firefox confounding localStorage with cookies when it comes to allowing or denying.

bluthru 12y ago

Could you please move the top toolbar to the side to create one side panel? It's taking up a lot of real estate on laptop screens.

joepie91_ 12y ago
On smaller screens, it should automatically move the entire sidebar to be a (relatively thin) footer bar instead. I should probably make the top bar shrink in height at that point as well. I suspect you might be just slightly above the cut-off for the small-screen layout. EDIT: Here's a ticket: https://github.com/joepie91/pdfy/issues/13 https://github.com/joepie91/pdfy/issues/13
- bluthru 12y ago
  What I'm describing is getting rid of the top bar and putting the logo in the side bar. Vertical screen real estate is precious.

BorisMelnik 12y ago

>"I got sick of documents getting locked up behind login walls of services like Scribd." Now thats a fantastic example of building a product around a real problem. If I even see domains like Scribd anymore I won't even give it a click. No, I don't want to sign up. I'd rather just do site:domain"thedoc.pdf" or some other way. I hope your product takes off and everyone uses it!

shire 12y ago

would be cool if we can edit pdf's

joepie91_ 12y ago
Editing of PDFs really is outside the scope of PDFy. There are quite a few PDF editors available elsewhere already, all of which will likely do the job better than PDFy ever could. Not to mention that editing of PDFs can be a somewhat painful experience :)
- Hengjie 12y ago
  To build on that, here's a list of web PDF editors that are available: 1. NotablePDF (https://web.notablepdf.com https://web.notablepdf.com) 2. PDFZen (http://pdfzen.com http://pdfzen.com) 3. PDF Escape (https://www.pdfescape.com/ https://www.pdfescape.com/) 4. PDF Buddy (http://pdfbuddy.com http://pdfbuddy.com)

ThrustVectoring 12y ago

This looks like duplicated effort to me. Upload the pdf to Google Drive, set the permissions to "people with link can view", and share the link it gives you. Alternatively, there's a publish to web option - they're identical in this use case. I already do something similar on my portfolio page - I have a link that downloads a pdf version of my resume on Google Drive.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
This comment is almost identical to one posted when Dropbox first premiered on HN. They were saying Dropbox was duplicated effort. Interface matters a lot.
- ThrustVectoring 12y ago
  That's a great point. The exact differences between the work flows: 1. Adds drag-and-drop to choose the file to upload 2. Cleaner permissions structure 3. The button is much bigger, and there's fewer options to do other things 4. Adds galleries to look at collections of PDF files 5. Exact same number (6) of mouse clicks to copy a link to a hosted pdf to clipboard 6. Removes log-in requirement (though to be fair, it's really easy to stay logged in to Google services) It seems to me to be a much smaller difference to the UI difference with Dropbox - the automatic mirroring and context menu actions are huge.
  - dingaling 12y ago
    > (though to be fair, it's really easy to stay logged in to Google services) Not particularly easy for the three-in-four Internet users who don't have any form of Google account, though...
- jonpaul 12y ago
  Yup. I would have never thought about using Google drive to share PDF publicly. Now that I know, still not sure I would. You're damn right, interface does matter.

namespace 12y ago

Great work @joepie91_! I wish your service the very best and hope that would scale against the DMCA brigade.

hansy 12y ago

This is really sweet, but if I may, what's wrong with using existing solutions like Dropbox or Google Docs? Neither shows a paywall or login screen when accessing the shared links. Unless you don't use either service, which is totally valid.

thomas4019 12y ago
Dropbox and Google docs rarely if even show up in Google search results. Will PDFy submit lists of content to search engines or be easily crawlable?
- joepie91_ 12y ago
  The gallery is plain HTML; all public documents are correctly (and quite rapidly, <1 day) indexed by Google. Unlisted documents get a noindex tag.
joepie91_ 12y ago
Both require accounts to upload files. EDIT: And both are more involved than just dragging and dropping a PDF.

Nux 12y ago

Very nice initiative! Good luck with it! I know this implies complexity, but I think it'd be nice if there was a comment feature for the PDFs, perhaps even something à la Soundcloud, i.e. per section comments. I'd love to find things such as my washing machine's manual improved by user experience through comments etc. :-D

joepie91_ 12y ago
I've actually been considering this. I'm not yet sure how to implement it, though - and while I'd love to have positional comments (perhaps 'annotations' would be a better term?), it'd require some significant modifications to the pdf.js viewer. Right now I'm quite swamped with stuff to do, but once I have some more free time I'll definitely be looking into this and some other enhancements that are currently sitting on the issue tracker.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Contact the author of this presentation, he wrote epub.js and could provide helpful advice. http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/slides/Hartnell.pdf http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/slides/Hartnell.pdf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xtj4LYBzRiw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xtj4LYBzRiw Related: http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/ http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/
- oever 12y ago
  Annotation pdfs would be great. It's a feature we'd love to implement for viewerjs, easy pdf viewer for in js, too. http://viewerjs.org http://viewerjs.org.
- Hengjie 12y ago
  Flick me an email hengjie (at) notablepdf.com, I think we could provide you with a viewer for free that has annotation features but also based on PDF.js so that you can easily switch it over.
jordanthoms 12y ago
We have that in Notable PDF ( http://notablepdf.com http://notablepdf.com ). We don't require that you host the file with us either - Files are fingerprinted, and comments can be made attached to that fingerprint (private by default, but can be made public to anyone who has the file). We're focusing on annotating documents within teams, schools, etc, but the public annotations to improve documents (à la rapgenius) is something we are thinking about. (We actually have the ability to share files with a link too)

jon4988 12y ago

I love it. But instead of "document.pdf" as the file name on download, what if you changed it to "[pdf title].pdf"? Several downloads in a row gets confusing

joepie91_ 12y ago
It should give you the original filename upon download, unless your browser ignores/mis-parses the Content-disposition header: https://github.com/joepie91/pdfy/blob/master/public_html/modules/download.php#L108 https://github.com/joepie91/pdfy/blob/master/public_html/mod... What browser are you using?
- jon4988 12y ago
  Weird, it works now... Was in Chrome 35: http://imgur.com/RhRafJK http://imgur.com/RhRafJK Anyhow, thanks for putting together such a great site!
- Hengjie 12y ago
  Were you letting users download it via PDF.js before which is why it was document.pdf? It makes sense to download it via PDF.js since the file is actually already loaded once the user renders it.
  - joepie91_ 12y ago
    Oh, that might actually be it. The 'download file' button in the pdf.js menu is a different button from the button at the bottom/right hand side of the page (with different code behind it - the pdf.js 'download' button comes stock with pdf.js). I haven't really tested its behaviour much, but it's quite possible that it's calling things document.pdf. Perhaps I should just remove the pdf.js 'download' button, seeing as there's one elsewhere in the UI anyway.

seesomesense 12y ago

Lots of copyrighted material there already. O'Reilley, Prentice Hall etc Get ready for a DCMA deluge.

diegolo 12y ago

Add comments on each pdf and it could become an important tool for (anonymously) reviewing papers

snowmaker 12y ago

Hello, I'm one of the founders of Scribd. You might be surprised to hear this, but I applaud the PDFy service and am glad someone has built it. Scribd is not designed to be a simple, lightweight way to host a PDF file. Yes, this was the original idea of Scribd 8 years ago, but we've long since left that path. We see that market as having been made irrelevant by a combination of Google Docs, Dropbox/Box.net/etc., and better PDF readers now built into browsers like Chrome. There may be room for someone to build an imgur like service for PDFs too, but that's not what we're doing. Scribd is really good for two things: 1) Scribd is a subscription reading service ("Netflix for books") where you can read over 400,000 professionally published books for $9 / month, including thousands of new releases and best-sellers. It doesn't include many programming books unfortunately (yet!), but if you like to read other things, it's a good deal. 2) Scribd is good for serious authors and publishers who want to publish a lot of content and organize it well. For example, the World Bank uploads thousands of research reports to Scribd and organizes them into collections. And many serious authors publish books and other writings with us. We're sorry that we haven't done a good enough of explaining who we are as it's changed over the years. And we're sorry if you've been frustrated trying to use Scribd for something it's not particularly good at. To joepie91_ - I think it's cool that you've started this. We have some experience building document hosting services, and I can see you are already encountering some issues we've worked on, like DMCA and copyright. If you'd like to talk, we'd be more than happy to help you out.

zapu 12y ago
Wow, I never knew. So far I've seen Scribd as very annoying pdf host, and most often I decide not to read the content at all when given a scribd link ("just send me the pdf, damn it!").
- digitalengineer 12y ago
  Same here. But then again we're not the clients. We're just 'using' the technology Sribd provides their clients I suppose.
multiplier 12y ago
Scribd was synonymous with copyright violation for years. Nice to see you're finally making an honest business out of it.

seqizz 12y ago

A login might be useful. You know.. to check (or delete) what I've uploaded and see the stats later.

digitalengineer 12y ago

Great idea. Just one little tip: I would not use the combination 'Instant and PDF' in your communication. Instant PDF is a well known product by Enfocus. It's basically a check-app for Print-optimized PDF files. As such it's a world-wide standard designers are forced to use. Create PDF, run it through Instant PDF, if approved it will attach a flightcheck report to said PDF and newspapers, magazines, printers can process the file. The flightcheck searches for common mistakes (non-embedded fonts, rgb colors, low res photo's, etc). Recently the Instant PDF name got absorbed by Connect but the brand Instant PDF is quite powerfull really).

ourjs 12y ago

I saw some sexy contents, will you delete them?

sarciszewski 12y ago
Delete them? Hah

McGuffin 12y ago

Whoa, opened the site to a bunch of obvious nsfw stuff. Maybe there should be an option to filter this?

mhd 12y ago

This really needs NSFW tagging. Right now, the "latest public documents" is full of hentai. Doesn't mean that people will actually do that, but at least giving uploaders an option wouldn't hurt.

juan_venter 12y ago
Yeah, I just ran into the same problem ! Opened the site at work and had to close asap !

jonpaul 12y ago

This is awesome! But I can't see it surviving on donations. Commercialize it please so that it survives. Tasteful ads aren't so bad like what Reddit does or Carbon[something]... I'm just concerned you won't survive on donations.

sarciszewski 12y ago
Check this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034529 :)
joepie91_ 12y ago
I absolutely don't need to commercialize it to keep it running. In fact, commercialization would come with an entire set of issues (and cost factors) of its own. I have a solid track record of running non-commercial services :)

maximumoverload 12y ago

I don't want to sound negative, but when I look at the "latest public documents", most of them seem to be copyright infridgement. But good luck anyway.

heeton 12y ago

I also made NextPrev.it a little while ago with a friend. It gives you option to host a PDF and control which page the viewer sees, perfect for presentations or looking through contracts etc.

anonbanker 12y ago

Wait, is this the joepie91 that used to hang out on #anonops?