Firefox, for all its great functionality and superior performance, has long been a laggard when it comes to managing PDF content on the Web.
Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers both give users the option of reading Portable Document Format content within the browser, while Firefox forces users to navigate to PDFs through its Downloads window. Not very convenient.
Leave it to Firefox's online community, however, to remedy this failing. While there are a range of Firefox plug-ins to help manage PDFs documents, two stand out for me.
The first, Download Statusbar, doesn't actually enable in-browser rendering of PDF documents but gives the user a status bar at the bottom of the browser window that displays the progress of downloads and allows the user to double-click any download to open it in the application of one's choice.
In other words, no more searching for the Downloads window to check on the status of a file download, and no more scouring one's hard drive to remember where the download went. Download Statusbar keeps it all in Firefox. For my PDF documents, I just double-click the status bar to open them in Preview. Easy.
If you use a Mac and you prefer to have PDFs rendered in the browser, you can thank Google for its simple but excellent Quartz PDF viewer, which does one thing really well: opens PDFs as if they were HTML right in the browser. If you want it to do more than that, well, it's an open-source project, so feel free to contribute.
If you use the two together, Google's Quartz PDF viewer overrides Download Statusbar for PDF files. So, if you want to manage PDFs through Download Statusbar, you won't want Quartz PDF viewer. But through add-ons like this, Mozilla and its large and diverse community have you covered.
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Sometimes an "upgrade" is anything but. Take Mac for Office 2008. While it did introduce a number of improvements over its Office 2004 cousin, it has broken one of the most important functions that I regularly use on my Mac:
The ability to save a document/spreadsheet/etc. into a PDF.
This has long been a staple of the Mac experience. Whatever you are writing can easily be converted into a PDF. Office for Mac 2008 breaks this compact, however, by mindlessly crashing most times that I try to convert a document into PDF.
A colleague tells me it's because Office for Mac 2008 introduces "PDF creation [that] is non-native to the application." Maybe he's right. I don't really care why it happens, I'm just annoyed that it happens so frequently. It has made the "Save as PDF" feature nearly unusable for me.
Is anyone else having this problem? A quick Google search doesn't turn up much, but I know my Mac colleagues share my pain on this.
Sun has just released a cool Java library - called the SwingLabs PDF Renderer - which "can parse PDF files and draw them to the screen."
Write a PDF once and run it anywhere? Sounds like a good fit for Java! Combined with PDF writing libraries (like iText), you can do pretty much anything you want with PDFs.
Sounds like an exceptionally cool piece of code to drop into a content management system or other code that deals with documents in any way. LGPL and so compatible with a wide range of open-source licenses.
Dave McAllister over at Adobe is suggesting that the ballot for PDF for Draft International Standard ballots are in, and with 93% apparently in favor, things are looking good for ISO 32000 PDF. Reading through Dave's post, it's clear that this is a much better way to create a true "standard" than what happened with OOXML.
OOXML was a case study in bare-knuckled lobbying. PDF? Not at all.
Now this was a lot of effort to pull together. We did follow a "lobby-free" policy with this effort. We did answer concerns when we were asked to clarify. We did log a few air miles when invited to discuss this in public forums. And we also took the PDF specification 1.7, removed any product dependencies, and created a world class draft standard. ...
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