Duff Johnson’s PDF Perspective

I’ve returned to Boston following the conclusion of this year’s PDF Central Conference in Minneapolis, MN.  Easel Solutions did a great job hosting the show, and I strongly recommend next year’s conference to anyone considering two days of intensive PDF education.

I gave two presentations which I’ll provide here.  The first was Making your PDFs comply with Section 508 and the second (an all-new presentation for me) was entitled “PDF is a RAD (Rapid Application Development) platform“.

I’m now in suspense waiting for my session reviews to come in.

Readers of this blog will (I hope) forgive me if I take a moment to mention that I’m changing jobs!  In the twelve and a half years since I founded Document Solutions, Inc., a company dedicated to adding value to PDF files, I’ve seen the technology grow from a way to reduce the size of PostScript data to become the predominant electronic document file-format on earth.

I’ve run DSI as a PDF document service-bureau for a long time.  Now, my path is changing, because DSI has announced our merger with Appligent. I start a new chapter as CEO of a software firm whose PDF manipulation applications are familiar (in a good way) to every serious player in the PDF space.

The combined company, Appligent Document Solutions, will offer both services-informed software and software-informed services with unprecedented expertise in PDF technology.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled Blog. Thank you for this brief indulgence, and once again, for taking the time to read this blog in the first place.

I’m always intrigued by new browsers, and Google is always intriguing anyway due to the company’s strategic heft. Of course I had to look at their just-announced browser, Chrome.

I’m going to try to live with this browser for a while and will report my views in greater detail, but I’m still getting used to the new Firefox, so don’t expect it soon.  I do have, however, some immediate impressions about how Chrome works with PDF.

I had wondered if Google was going to (try to) write their own PDF viewer for Chrome.  Not this time; the installer seems to find and use the Acrobat/Reader plugin, assuming it’s already installed into Firefox or (presumably) IE. That’s a good start.

Then I hit the skids.

My first stop in testing Chrome with PDFs was to check out performance with a large PDF file.  In Microsoft’s Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox, properly-configured PDF files are “Fast Web View” enabled, and display the first-requested page while continuing to download the rest of the file in the background.

This single feature makes even very large PDF files readily workable on the web, even in low-bandwidth settings, and is one of the key factors in the success of the PDF format.

Under IE and FireFox, the Acrobat/Reader browser plugin works as intended, and Fast Web View PDFs appear quickly.  Chrome, however, seems to block Fast Web View in the same browser plugin.  I could find no way to turn this block off in Chrome’s options - please let me know if I’m missing something!

Google’s going to have to rectify this situation before Chrome has a prayer of becoming a mainstream browser.