PDF and the web

[William Shipley]

There are three available.

Two come from Germany, both free.  PDFViewer.app is pretty good but somewhat buggy (it hangs forever on a lot of files) and doesn't do font substitution for missing fonts (so most documents have overlapping words and the bold and italic and serif attributes are lost).  PDFViewer does have support for bookmarks, which is pretty neat in documents that have them.  PDFViewer is written by Detlev Droege.

The second, PDFView.app, is much better, albeit slower.  Unfortunately it uses Adobe's copyrighted PDF->PS translation code, and thus as far as I know it is illegal to use in the US.  You can tell it uses this code because when you print from it the actual copyright notice by Adobe is still intact.  Since they've taken Adobe's translation code, though, their translation is dot on (surprise).  PDFView has really good font substitution.  If you are an individual user Adobe's copyrights probably don't sway you so much, but I would advise companies to investigate this before deploying PDFView at their sites.  PDFView is written by Gunther Furthaller.

OmniPDF.app, unlike the two others, doesn't do the PDF translation in PostScript; I wrote my own PDF parser from scratch in Objective-C.  This makes mine much faster, although it was initially a bit more work.  Mine is also the only PDF viewer in existence that outputs conforming print jobs; useful if you like previewing or sending PS versions of PDF files to colleagues.  OmniPDF is several times faster than PDFView and a little faster than PDFViewer.

In addition, OmniPDF will eventually work seamlessly with OmniWeb to use URLs inside PDF documents.  This is why I wrote my own; I wanted control over it so I could integrate it with OmniWeb.

Finally, OmniPDF is supported by Lighthouse Design.  This is important to some people, less so than others.  There will be a non-expiring single-user copy of OmniPDF up on the archive sites in the next couple of days.

Really, to be honest, PDF viewers as a class all pretty much view PDF, and which one you use is a matter of preference.  OmniWeb 1.0 will work with any of them to view PDF documents.  OmniWeb 2.0 will be tightly integrated with OmniPDF to not only view documents but interact with them intelligently.

-Wil Shipley