Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Right click and save as” needs to go away

svarden.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 194 posts

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#161

Post by crag »

sspiff wrote: post #79
raverbashing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

There are other readers in Windows (besides Window's 8 built in metro (full-screen) reader). Ever hear of Foxit http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/ ? Mush much faster than Adobe Arobat.

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#162

Post by zw »

udp wrote: post #136
raverbashing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's funny how many Windows users seem to think the PDF format is intrinsically slow, and all because of Acrobat Reader. Safari on OS X renders a PDF just as quickly as any other webpage, and always has.

Have no fear, the Chrome PDF plugin has brought all that slowness back. Joy.

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#163

Post by chocolateboy »

Aardwolf wrote: post #128
jrochkind1 wrote: post #13

There are already ways to force browsers to download using HTTP headers. The author says this is a "server-side solutions to front-end problem", okay. But anyways, when pages use this already, it OFTEN pisses me off, when I want to look at a PDF in browser, but the web app/page is forcing me to save it to disk and then re-open it in another app. What we _really_ need, that we _don't_ have a way to do right now -- is…

I would love to have an option in the right click menu to IGNORE the HTTP headers. For example, sometimes there is a link to an image like a jpg or a png that then forces you to download it. It REFUSES to ever render it in your browser. A right click option to ignore all MIME types and show it based on extention or magic bytes in the file would be AWESOME. Why do no browsers have that?

As mentioned below, this is available in Firefox: http://spasche.net/openinbrowser/

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#164

Post by harshreality »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #157
harshreality wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF preserves layout whereas html doesn't (generally, although it can preserve layout somewhat if you specify one font, fix font sizes, and fix all dimensions), but that's a negative for PDFs. 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. Th…

I think you're missing a key part of citing (at least for me), paraphrasing. When discussing sentiment or similar without quoting, you wouldn't know what to search for. It makes sense to give a page number to review and get more information on the source, without that you wouldn't know where to look. You'd have to read the entire source. For text, only section in your "less-granular searching" would work, and not nec…

If you're paraphrasing, then you could direct-quote a critical part of the text so that a reader knows what to search for.

A writer could also adopt page-neutral paragraph or sub-paragraph numbering. This is common, for instance, in classical texts (where such numbering has been done retrospectively, by scholars, because of the difficulties of citing passages with so many translations - the same general problem that paraphrasing has). To cite a few major examples, Plato's and Artistotle's works have such numbering, as does Hobbes' Leviathan.

Page numbering has poor granularity for citations in real scholarly work (where you'd ideally want to be able to cite within a few lines at most), and it prohibits flowed text. If someone has some case where they think they need page numbers for citations, they should figure out an alternative (a few of which have been outlined above).

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#165

Post by ender7 »

Note that the "download" attribute is extremely useful when the href is a data or blob URI [1]. This allows you to construct the file that the user is going to get in Javascript, rather than server-side. For example, if you wanted to write an image-editing web app and didn't want to round-trip to the server to allow them to download a copy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#166

Post by anigbrowl »

chrisfarms wrote: post #18

One small nitpick: please please don't make all your files download with a single filename. In the article it gives an example of "fixing" a hideous generated filename like "203759-fs3.pdf" to download as "invoice.pdf". Yes this is a little nicer, but please be _even_ nicer and put other relevant info in the filename, "invoice-2013-01-01.pdf" is infinitely more useful to me. Context: My bank forces statement download…

I could not agree more. Why, why, WHY don't people set metadata fields for PDFs (and other documents, but especially pdfs) and why don't websites use/require that metadata? We could be running a semantic web right now and be a year or two ahead of where we are if people would actually think more than one step ahead.

/fume

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#167

Post by jakerocheleau »

wwweston wrote: post #151
jrochkind1 wrote: post #13

There are already ways to force browsers to download using HTTP headers. The author says this is a "server-side solutions to front-end problem", okay. But anyways, when pages use this already, it OFTEN pisses me off, when I want to look at a PDF in browser, but the web app/page is forcing me to save it to disk and then re-open it in another app. What we _really_ need, that we _don't_ have a way to do right now -- is…

That's a pretty good idea -- perhaps a "prompt" attribute instead of a "download" attribute. Lends itself reasonably well to a JS-only implementation, too: http://jsfiddle.net/FLa8P/1/

Awesome fiddle! Thanks for sharing that here, it's definitely a unique solution.

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#168

Post by kleiba »

Firefox quirk

When specifying a value for the attribute, Firefox will not automatically give the file the correct file extension like Chrome does. [...]

I beg to differ. This is not a "quirk" and Chrome does not anything "correctly" that Firefox doesn't. From the HTML5 spec, regarding the "download" attribute:

"There are no restrictions on allowed values, but authors are cautioned that most file systems have limitations with regard to what punctuation is supported in file names, and user agents are _likely_ to adjust file names accordingly." [1] (emphasis mine)

As we can see, the spec clearly does not require a browser to do anything to the filename given as download's value. And it seems that the only reason a browser should consider doing any kind of change -- according to the spec -- is if the underlying OS cannot handle a filename's syntax. I don't know if Windows still does that but e.g. DOS used to have a restriction that filesnames must be at most 8 characters, and end in a dot followed by a three letter extension. Unix-derived operating system do not have the system, so if the OP is running on, say, on a Mac, there's no reason for Firefox to fiddle with the filename. It conforms to the standard.

Now, which behavior is more reasonable is a totally different question, of course...

[1] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/links.html#attr...

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#169

Post by aninhumer »

sesqu wrote: post #160
GhotiFish wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's reader is an improvement over Adobe's, sure, but that's like beating snail in a foot race. Go Firefox, you show'em Chrome! It's still not SumatraPDF, it's not Evince. Saving the file and having it auto-open these programs takes less time then waiting for the browsers PDF readers to kick in. Of course it could be better, but frankly, I'd rather things be more unix'y, not less.

A major problem with saving all pdf files to be opened in a separate program is having to delete the temporary files afterwards. That's not very unix-y. Another, less common, problem is erasing the URL in the process.

> having to delete the temporary files afterwards

If you select "Open with..." instead of saving it, you don't have to. Honestly though I often find myself wishing I'd saved a copy later.

Post reply on HN