Apr 20

PdfMeNot: Online PDF Reader

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on February 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

PdfMeNot We previously wrote about a free online PDF reader called Samuraj Data that is so darn simple that it’s hard not to love it. There’s no Flash required and no fancy graphics, just point it to the PDF file you want to view and it will do the rest. Starting tomorrow there will be a new kid on the block, and it comes straight from the creators of BugMeNot.

We’ve got you covered: Instructions on accessing the new site *today* can be found at the end of the article.

PdfMeNot lets users specify a URL to a PDF file or upload one that is stored on their computer. It is then converted to a Flash document complete with zooming capabilities, and much like Scribd you can embed any of the PDF’s on your own site. The big difference is the PdfMeNot takes almost no time at all to do the conversion, and after that they will cache the file so that subsequent requests are nearly instantaneous.

A set of tools is also available, and many of you will likely flock to the bookmarklet that they have available. The bookmarklet will convert any PDF links on a website to PdfMeNot links. Webmasters can also add one line of code to their website(s) that will automatically convert links to PDF files.

Despite all of the good things that PdfMeNot does do, there are still some improvements that I would like to see:

  • There is no progress bar that shows you how much longer you have to wait before it’s all done. I think this is especially needed for when users are uploading files.
  • This apparently doesn’t handle some of the larger PDF files very well. When I gave PdfMeNot the URL to a 7.9MB file it would pop up saying that it was able to download about half of the file, but then timed out.
  • You have to enter in “http://” when specifying the URL. That is so 1995.
  • You have to click a button each time you want to go to the next page. Why can’t it be setup so that I can just keep scrolling?

If you want to give PdfMeNot a whirl before it launches tomorrow here is a sample PDF that I’ve already got cached on their system. The site is password protected until it launches on Thursday, but thanks to Webware the username stateless and password systems will get you in early.

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