Asphalt Roads

Create a PDF with free tools is rather easy. Going a little bit deeper requires more knowledge, time and money not directly proportional to the expected results. And that’s just for users that are prone to research on their own. The vast majority of users doesn’t want to be bother with installing new applications, learning different ways or just slowing down their workflow.

Peter Forret has a great idea — let the PDF exist in a space similar to what YouTube is for videos.

He goes a long way explaining the inner workings of this system, and wisely avoids the copyright problem.

The service of his dreams would be relatively easy to set up, he lists the following features:

• The difference between automatically downloading or opening a document can be controlled with the Content-Type HTTP header.
• the JPG preview of a PDF file can be created with ImageMagick + GhostScript (free)
• you could easily add the same services for remote PDFs, i.e. the customer gives a URL instead of uploading a document. There is a whole copyright minefield there that I will wisely ignore.
• Since we will have stored or cached each PDf file, it’s easy to let users add PDFs to their own PDFviewr storage account.
• A connection to a remote print and bind service like Print(fu) is very easy to make. It’s a pity Print(fu) does not ship to Europe yet, because I would surely use them to have e.g. the DCI specs (176 pages) printed in a nice booklet.
• The equivalent for Youtube’s video format conversion (Quicktime, MPEG4, AVI … to Flash video) is our PDF conversion to HTML, JPG.
• Since documents are normally formatted in portrait orientation (higher than wide) and computer screens are normally in landscape orientation (wider than high), they are no natural match. To view a PDF document on screen, one could use a two-facing-pages layout for large screens, or a half-a-page-at-a-time approach for smaller screens.
• In all our web 2.0 enthousiasm, we could add folksonomy (tags), comments, ratings … so that “good content” would float up.
• Monetisation? Well, add a payment system for commercial documents.

That, at least for me, sounds good. If he gets working on this possibly he can have a succesful start-up company.