Whether or not you're a fan of the great website registration bypassing service BugMeNot, I think you're really going to like a new service from the same shop called PdfMeNot. (username: stateless password: systems until Thursday) It creates a Flash display of any PDF document! No need to download the document and launch another application to view it anymore - PdfMeNot lets you convert PDFs by upload, URL, bookmarklet or a script entered into a website's page if you're the publisher.
I've added the bookmarklet to my browser toolbar and may never download another PDF again.
Unless I want to search inside it, keep it for my records or read it on my phone - but you get the idea, publishers push PDFs more often than they need to.
Here's a quick way you can try it out: Go to the tools page, drag the javascript bookmarklet to your toolbar, then go to this Creative Commons page where there's a link to a press release from yesterday in PDF format. Click on your bookmarklet, then click the PDF link. Voilà! I love it!
See also Issuu, which is more complicated and does other things, but also works magic with PDF files.
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Looks nice... I still think PDF's are a damn sight better than MS office documents. :)
Posted by: David Novakovic | February 12, 2008 5:51 PMDavid, fair enough. In most cases I just view those in GDocs via Gmail.
Posted by: Marshall KirkpatrickDo you have any invites to this service? It seems to be in limited beta.
Posted by: Ginny Brady | February 12, 2008 6:39 PMGinny- access with username "stateless", password "systems".
I also regularly use their other website:
Posted by: Toby | February 12, 2008 6:47 PMhttp://www.retailmenot.com
You do know that there are several Adobe/Macromedia offerings that do this on the fly, right - for instance, if you run a ColdFusion server, you can achieve/duplicate this functionality in less than a day!
Posted by: Don | February 12, 2008 7:12 PMDon, I believe it. Fortunately, I got a browser bookmarklet that will do it for me in just minutes and I didn't even have to run a ColdFusion server! I hear it's possible to make some pretty darned good cheese at home, too, but I haven't gotten around to doing that either.
Posted by: Marshall KirkpatrickCan you make cheese at home?
Posted by: Guy | February 12, 2008 7:46 PMPDF is not that bad provided that you are using the right tools to open it. I do not use Adobe Acrobat Reader - I use my Mac's Preview and xpdf on Linux. I use NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org office suites to generate my own PDF -- if not, the built-in PDF support of Mac OS X.
However, I wish that a new file format be made to replace PDF but it should be based on open and global standards (not the ones proposed by Microsoft!).
Posted by: rom.myopenid.comThis is not really new!
Scribd.com lets you do it in a rudimentary way, and I think Zmags.com and pagegangster.com in Denmark, as well as a bunch of other smaller sites have been doing what Issuu offers for a while now.
Posted by: TA | February 12, 2008 8:29 PMI made a quick Firefox extension for this. It automatically replaces PDFs with links to PdfMeNot.
While the service is passworded:
http://why.gd/downloads/pdfmenot_extension_passworded.xpi
For when they unpassword they service, install this one:
http://why.gd/downloads/pdfmenot_extension.xpi
Releasing these into the public domain, free to use/release, do whatever. Enjoy!
Posted by: Matthew | February 12, 2008 10:11 PMMatthew:
Holy c**p, you don't muck around do you?
Posted by: Ron R | February 13, 2008 12:07 AMThis is great :) Mainly because of the speed. These bookmarklet features are more and more popular. It still suprises me how much can you accomplish with them (so far I use cocomments, delicious, and now this). Anyone knows any other i should try?
As for word/gmail. The formatting usually goes sh*t - pdf's are a lot better for that. For me - simplicity is the killer feature in this thing. In anything for that matter. This is why I use gMail over Outlook for instance.
Posted by: Marcin Grodzicki | February 13, 2008 5:24 AMI use FoxIt for opening PDFs as it's much quicker than Adobe's own offering, but this service is much better. I'm surprised no one thought of it sooner.
Posted by: Robert | February 13, 2008 5:35 AMAny password seems to work with 'stateless' username.
@Matthew, When I click on the FF extensions, my browser tries to download it instead of installing.
Posted by: pratham.nameI'm a huge fan of bugmenot and retailmenot. Looking forward to seeing how this works.
Posted by: rekha | February 13, 2008 8:58 AMCool tool. Along with Read Later, PdfMeNot has now become must-have toolbar widgets.
Posted by: Mark Evans | February 13, 2008 11:07 AMHere are 5 ways to convert your PDFs to SWF for free
Posted by: Information Madness | February 13, 2008 12:22 PMCool name:-)
Btw, Zoho Viewer does this for pdf, doc, ppt, xls:
Posted by: Zoli Erdoshttp://viewer.zoho.com/
Please note that the Firefox addon I posted above has been updated by PdfMeNot themselves, so you want to download the latest Firefox addon here:
http://pdfmenot.com/tools/
Posted by: Matthew | February 16, 2008 9:42 PMTwo more sites - same family feature-wise:
https://share.adobe.com/
Posted by: Stateless | March 3, 2008 1:56 AMhttp://www.docstoc.com/