Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document • Hacker News Board

Re: Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document

#51

Post by snprbob86 » Thu, Jan 01, 2009, 10:47 PM UTC

Flash provides a PDF viewer component. I'd like to use it because I intend to adorn documents on my pages with additional controls and interactions. I can't inject my own UI and logic into your desktop PDF viewer.

Unfortunately, this Flash component only handles PDFs, not the wide spectrum of document formats. If I could reliably convert Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, etc. server side to PDF, then I would be a very happy boy.

Does anyone know of any such software that can do this? I doubt Scribd would be the one to provide it, but I would really love a simple `anything2pdf` that "just works": `cat foo.doc | anything2pdf > foo.pdf`

Re: Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document

#52

Post by lackbeard » Thu, Jan 01, 2009, 11:24 PM UTC

LogicHoleFlaw wrote: post #46

abstractbill wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real place I could see Flash being great for mibbit is it would allow you to build an embed that could be used on sites like Myspace which allow Flash but not Javascript content. Let me know if you ever want me to show you how to get a sane Flash dev environment set up - I have the war-wounds from writing most of Justin.TV's Flash code ;-)

Make it a blog post of some sort? I'd read it.

I'd be interested in reading that as well.

Re: Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document

#53

Post by jules » Sat, Jan 03, 2009, 10:59 AM UTC

marketer wrote: post #48

jules wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a fair comparison: you need a viewer for swf files too. Downloading is not a problem. If it takes 0.3 s on scribd vs 0.8 s with pdf, then I'm willing to wait to have a viewer that allows me to scroll with my scrollwheel.

What browser do you use? Scrolling with the wheel works fine in Scribd, at least in Firefox. Not to be pedantic, but the Adobe Flash Runtime is tiny compared to Acrobat or Word, and effectively has a 0 startup cost.

Opera. Another reason why people shouldn't use Scribd: you have to register to download the pdf.