Show Pdf

I feel terribly bad because I just spent half the day building a little web tool when I shouldn’t have. What I should do is work on my thesis, which–believe it or not–is nearing completion.


Show Pdf
Anyway, I got the idea yesterday that it would be nice with a way of viewing PDF-files straight in the browser because 1) PDF support in Firefox died again after the PDF Browser Plugin stopped working (for some unknown reason), 2) because I think documents, at least standard ones, should be viewable straight from the browser, preferably without using a plugin (Google Docs leads the way), and 3) because a friend showed me a plugin for Firefox that let’s you do just that, but in a not-so-nice way.

So I built a little tool that is awfully buggy at the moment…but you get the idea. It’s a simple proxy for PDF-files that takes any url for a PDF document and displays it as html using pdftohtml. Feed it with an url like this “showpdf.com/url-to-my-pdf” and it will show the document in the browser (Here is an example). Good for emailing links to PDF:s, for example.

 February 8th, 2007

One Response to “Show Pdf”

  1. Igor Novick (RUSSIA) Says:

    LETTER OF THANKS

    Hello, Eric

    I have just tryed your ShowPDF.com tool and it worked pretty well with my specific browser.
    I was happily surpraised at the fact that your converting service can
    handle Russian documents as well, whilst the Acrobate online convertor can not.

    Your ShowPDF is a real Godsend on all the mobile users — PDA, cell phones, WebTV and so on….

    Keep up this useful tool as long as possible !!
    Dont cease it !!!

    Thanks one more….
    Igor
    Netgem Netbox-Tv user.

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