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.

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