Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

PDF Plugin¶

226 words on Software

There is version 2.0 of the tremendously nice and useful PDF Browser plugin. It's probably one of the best utilites I know, given that viewing PDFs of papers is one of my favourite pastimes these days. It has many new features and thankfully is still free for private/education use.

While I am not really keen on it having a toolbar now, the ability to view two bits of a document at once thanks to a 'split bar', support for table of contents and even the visual indication of links – something even Preview doesn't do – make it worth the upgrade. Scrolling seems a bit slower than before, though. At least on my computer it's a bit too slow for my taste.

The only thing I still miss is the find feature of Preview, I guess. Since it's addition to Preview I have been using it constantly. It is so much more efficient than traditional find features – sometimes even more efficient than looking things up in the index or table of contents. I wonder how people ever did without this. I feel seriously crippled when having to use Acrobat now…

P.S. While I think that both PDF Browser Plugin and Apple's PDF handling are great programs, I still think Apple should be embarrassed about not providing PDF support in Safari out of the box.

February 27, 2004, 10:05

Tagged as software.

Comments

Comment by Joe Clark: ¶

Whatever do you mean? Safari and Firefox open PDFs right inside the browser, no questions asked. Even tagged PDF 1.6s.

March 1, 2004, 6:22

Comment by Gummi: ¶

Safari and Firefox open PDFs right inside the browser

They do? This is news to me and I just tried it on my TiBook running Panther (10.3.2) to make sure, it failed. Is there a special way of doing this?

By the way, I like the PDF browser plugin but since the new update to Preview I’m finding it hard to justify. My major gripe with Preview in Jaguar was the slow-slow speed, where the ATS_Server would gobble up CPU cycles. Panther’s PDF handling is amazing, a real leap -with the find function and other little touches I’m glad I never have to go back to Acrobat, except to concatenate PDF files.

March 1, 2004, 11:17

Comment by Dave Walker: ¶

The Quicktime plugin can be configured to handle PDFs in the browser, but it only allows you to see the first page of a multi-page PDF file, which means it’s fairly useless for the purpose.

March 1, 2004, 21:01