141–150 of 194 posts
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there are at least 3 ways to save an opened pdf with chromes viewer.
Unless it comes from one of a number of journal or research sites, where at least one of those options will no longer work.
What's with Chrome adding extensions to the filename? Is this behaviour specific to Chrome on Windows or standard across all platforms? The world does not revolve around windows. File extensions are optional, not mandatory, in unix land. If the site says the file is named foobar, its name is foobar not foobar.txt.
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Which is funny, because I absolutely loathe opening in the browser, I prefer saving it. Chrome and FF PDF viewers are better, but with Acrobat it was a bag of hurt. Also, see: saving is the more generic answer. Save and you can see it, open it and before the Chrome 'save' button you had to re-download it.
I agree that the Acrobat plugin was a pain (and I always made sure to disable it in Firefox), but I absolutely love the Firefox in-browser PDF viewer. It doesn't lock up the PC while loading, and it has a convenient download button that doesn't seem to redownload the PDF when clicked (much like saving an already loaded image).
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It's good to see such a comprehensive list, but these only help me if I want to configure download vs view on a per-filetype basis? There's no way to make some pdfs "display" in the browser and others force download using these headers, correct?
Dynamically select among these using a query string parameter in the link to the file.
If we are trying to FORCE a download, then this really is a server-side issue. If we want to give the user the choice, then it is a front-end issue.
The crux of the article is all about taking away the user's choice ... and so a server-side solution seems more reasonable per @jrochkind1.
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Browsers (or site owners) could probably do a better job of differentiating links with download attributes. Maybe on mouse over show a little download cursor or something.
In the "old times" Firefox asked me whether I wanted to download and then open, download into temp and then open, or download into a to-be-selected folder; with an addon I could force browse render as an option, too. Yet, this required two mouse clicks in the "worst case" that the default selection didn't fit. I think the best solution is: if no download attribute set and Content-Disposition is not "attachment", then…
Just go to Options->General->Downloads, tick Always ask me where to download files
Internet Explorer also works like this practically eliminating step 1,2 and 4 from your scenario above.
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As long as people (mostly academia and research orgs) continue to publish their content exclusively in PDF form, then there will be a need to look at that content in a web browser. I work at a university and it is amazing at how much content exists only as a PDF, even if it would be better suited as regular old HTML content. Trying to turn that ship around would also interfere with numerous business processes and ent…
To be fair, there are a number of advantages to having content in PDF's rather than HTML. For example, 1. The formatting is more static. Papers and memos and other documents are created and intended to be artifacts, not just mutable information, and PDFs can preserve that better. In 10 years, the PDF will look more like it did originally than HTML in tomorrow's browsers. 2. They're more durable. As a self-contained d…
Different displays have different resolutions and different dimensions. That makes fixed layouts obnoxious to read on e-readers. The most obvious example of how fixed formatting is an abomination is a PDF on an ebook reader.
There is one reigning reason for having a fixed page layout: ability to cite pages, e.g. for academic citations.
There is no need to cite pages for works that have good digital versions, other than antiquated citation requirements (e.g. MLA/CMS). Ebook readers have text search. Cite a digital form of the work, and anyone with that work in digital form can find it... an exception being OCR'd pdfs and ebooks converted from PDFs, because OCR often screws up line breaks or has other errors that make searching unreliable.
For less-granular searching, there's section, table, and image numbering/labeling. Again, fixed layout is not required to make content searchable.