jump to navigation

A better way to deal with PDF documents November 10, 2006

Posted by Felixe in Uncategorized.
trackback

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.


Comments»

1. ganzo - November 13, 2006

I’m not so sure about a successful start-up. The success about youTube is that people can watch videos for entertainment, or get a media clip with a certain point of view, or to see something interesting.

PDF’s will be documents, with words and ideas. People don’t read. People are lazy. If you include images in the PDF, then people will want the images. Flickr is good for that already. If you just want the text, then why use PDF? Just put the text directly in html and post. Of course, PDF allows you to have an extra layer, so that cuting and pasting isn’t as easy…

Anyway,.. just my ideas today.

2. Felixe - November 14, 2006

People are lazy, right. But much of that lazy people need hard info in the form of specs, datasheets, books — that’s what PDF is good at.

And a way to simplify publishing PDF’s sounds like a good idea to me.