Google Builds a Native PDF Reader Into Chrome

An anonymous reader writes "Google's latest Chrome 6 Developer Update comes with a few subtle GUI changes, but there is also a major update under the hood. As its ties with Adobe quite apparently grow stronger, there is not just an integrated Flash player, but also a native PDF reader in the latest version of Chrome 6. Google says the native reader will allow users to interact with PDF files just like they do with regular HTML pages. The reader is included in Chrome versions (Chromium) 6.0.437.1 and higher, and you can use the feature after you have enabled it manually in the plug-ins menu. That is, of course, if you can keep Chrome 6 alive — Windows users have reported frequent crashes, and Google has temporarily suspended the update progress to find out what is going on." The Register has some more details on the PDF plugin and a link to Google's blog post about it.

Comments

Re:PDF is fat

[abulafia]

PDFs tend to bloat for at least two reasons - one is the inclusion of tons of rasters and other embedded objects, and that's a problem between chair and keyboard - the resultant documents are just was was asked for. The other is that PDF is (a superset of) a subset of Postscript. Some combinations of software and the drivers that generate PDFs, can do insanely redundant things that cause massive documents. One neat workflow I saw several years ago was placing raster images into Illustrator objects, then through a DTP program to be rendered to PDF. That particular software stack/combination of transformations managed add something like 400x bloat compared to the same document produced in a different way.

Generating non-insane Postscript used to be a solved problem, but it appears to come back every so often.

Also, changes in the PDF happened some time back that had big size advantages. Documents generated by old PDF renderers are going to tend to be larger than those generated by newer ones. (I don't really recall the details, but some of it was how embedded objects are stored.)