Pdf.js Reaches First Milestone

theweatherelectric writes "The pdf.js project aims to implement a PDF viewer using standards-compliant Web technologies. The project has reached its first milestone: it renders the sample PDF (a paper on Mozilla's Tracemonkey JavaScript engine) perfectly. However, that perfection currently comes with some caveats: 'pdf.js produces different results on pretty much every element in the browser×OS matrix. We said above that pdf.js renders the Tracemonkey paper "perfectly" if you're running a Firefox nightly. On a Windows 7 machine where Firefox can use Direct2D and DirectWrite. If you ignore what appears to be a bug in DirectWrite's font hinting. The paper is rendered less well on other platforms and in older Firefoxen, and even worse in other browsers. But such is life on the bleeding edge of the web platform.'"

Comments

Re:Wow

[Spad]

If you read the article (I know, I know)...

pdf.js has now reached the point where a significant portion of its issues are actually browser-rendering-engine bugs, or missing features. Finding these gaps and filling some of them has been one of the biggest returns on our investment in pdf.js so far.

The problem isn't what they've written so much as the browsers not being able to support the latest and greatest HTML5/JS functionality.

The one true markup

[Ed Avis]

This is really cool. Now we just need to have web2js instead of web2c, and we can typeset documents with TeX in the browser.

Re:goal to make things suck?

[Vellmont]

But it seems amazingly inferior to a platform native PDF reader, on any platform imaginable. It will be slower the native x86/ARM code by far, and won't integrate well with the desktop environment.

What's with this trend recently to build everything on fundamentally sucky technologies?

You're absolutely right. A platform native PDF reader is technically superior. But opening up a new window for each PDF you display really sucks as a user experience. To eliminate this sucky UI experience, browsers support PDF natively (I'm not sure why this hasn't happened), and not rely on Adobe reader, or some other helper application. Even if all the major browsers supported that TODAY, it would be literally years before a broad enough spectrum of people upgraded to use inline PDFs in a design.

What implementing a PDF reader in javascript accomplishes is across the board inline PDFs today. No upgrades required. I think that's worth some sucky technology and inefficient code.