Online PDF viewers: Man, what are they on?
TechCrunch in particular has gone all crazy for the new online PDF viewer Issuu. It’s hard to argue with the fact that it’s raised the bar on slick presentation (it has that clean, Mac look and feel to it) but to claim it is the first online viewer that doesn’t suck is a bit of a stretch. I’d suggest they wind it back a little and say it sucks for some PDF files and excels with others.
There’s a big difference between viewing and reading
Take a look at the site and you’ll see a bunch of beautiful documents full of artwork, pictures, photos and more, and for these kinds of content, it’s a really fine implementation. It feels clean and simple using the site, and moving through the pages of a document feels pretty intuitive. (Click on the screenshot below.)
Up until now I’ve had an issue with these kinds of services encouraging users to embed their files into web pages at a size that’s way too small to be useful, but in the case of the graphically-rich and textually-light content on Issuu, it’s a great fit. Check out the demo embeded in on the page at TechCrunch for an example — the photos look interesting and I can get a good feel for the content of the file. Then if I want to look in more detail I can just click on through to the larger version.
Once viewing the file on their site, you can look pretty closely at the pages and use the Mac-like feature along the bottom to view pages a little larger before selecting them. (See the screenshot above for an example.)
The reading sucks
The interface starts to fail when text-heavy documents are opened. Pages are forced into a two-page spread mode — essentially meaning there’s going to be at least two columns to work through when reading — but unfortunately the tools aren’t quite right for it.
In Issuu the tool to quickly zoom in on an area of a page is pretty intuitive (one-click: zoom in, one-click: zoom out), but once you start trying to move around (e.g. to read the two columns of text) it’s counterintuitive and confusing. The functionality is only bearable if you’re performing the smallest amount of reading.
Alternatives such as Scribd allow you to just scroll up/down through the whole document, which doesn’t look as slick, but for text-heavy files is a more practical option.
For online PDF viewers, it’s really a matter of horses for courses.
A background on online PDF viewers
In case it’s of interest, what you may not realise is that when you look at these files online, you are no longer looking at the original PDF file. Once it’s uploaded, it’s converted to FlashPaper, which is then displayed through a Flash viewer. FlashPaper was built some years ago by Macromedia as an online alternative to PDF. Adobe acquired Macromedia and the relationship between PDF and Flash has blossomed.
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