They're doing something tricky too. It looks like they're converting pages to PNG, but maintaining the ability to highlight text. I don't think there's any Flash there either.

I gotta say, Scribd's PDF viewer is looking pretty clunky now!

My best guess on implementation for that is to send back a list of selectable rectangles along with the PNG, then highlight them via javascript. No clue how they're copying it to my clipboard, though...

The solution I know of is to use Flash as a proxy to copy to the clipboard. I don't think there is a standard way of doing this without going through Flash.

Javascript has copy-to-clipboard functions available in most modern browsers.

Don't you have to change a user preference to do it in firefox?

Feature request: docs.google.com/pdfview?{URL}

So what's this going to mean for scribd? Are they going to go way of the YC startup web 2.0 calendar that ebayed themselves off, after Google Calendar came out?

Even worse, they are going the way of a company built around a feature. Kiko users would have had to consciously move to Google Calendar. With PDF viewing most people won't even notice if what they are using changed. (I'm not ranting against Scribd - the same applies to others, like YouTube, which are essentially viewers for data that's hard to view.)

Scribd's approach of being a destination website is completely broken IMHO, because the Web already has a destination to read any type of text - the Web itself. What they should've had is a Firefox plugin that captures my PDF links and opens them in Scribd instead of Adobe Reader. Google is doing this for mail and I'm sure a feature like that is in the plans for Google Toolbar.

This is a completely different thing than Scribd.

Scribd is a document uploading and management service that converts .pdfs, .docs, .xls, everything under the sun.

This is an extremely nice way to view PDFs linked to from google search and gmail.

It doesn't seem completely different.

Scribd: Upload a document, make it visible to anyone Gmail: Email a document, make it visible to anyone (that you explicitly name)

Scribd: Converts pdf, doc, xls, lots of stuff Gmail: Converts pdf, doc, supports any file type (the recipient may need software for it)

Seems to me like both are squarely aimed at the "sharing documents" market.

Scribd is all about turning documents into public URLs.

The new google service is about sending documents to people or small groups.

This is very nice. I wish there was a Firefox plugin that would automatically make all PDFs open in this. I hate the disruption of having to switch to another application to view text that happens to be in a different format. (Even embedding gv inside Firefox would be acceptable, actually.)

You should give it a shot. You might have to gmail the docs to yourself though, which could rival Acrobat startup time.

Fast PDF viewing right in your browser? Like Safari has built in?

I'm tired of "solutions" to this non-problem for people with decent browsers. Can you at least detect that I'm using a browser that handles PDFs well and just give me the original?

Just click "download" instead of "view"... problem solved. gmail gives you both options.

Most of the times I open up pdf attchemtens in Preview, but this come in handy when I just need to take a quick look at an attachments to check something.

in Chrome, clicking "Download" in gmail, it gives me a "Save File as" dialog. it can display PDFs alright. it's just that gmail tells it to download all attachments when choosing "download" instead of just displaying them.

Also handy when you're not at your computer, or at one with download restrictions. I agree Safari has a fast PDF viewer though.

so it's a solution for 70%+ who don't use safari, stop being an elitest

I love these guys!

discovered this yesterday. soo amazing. now I just waiting for powerpoint previews

it already does that... ;)

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

Me too! I just opened a doc yesterday and didnt know that it was a new feature.

I just opened a PDF doc yesterday. But it took a lot of time to open those images(or whatever). Looks a lot simpler. I love it!

In my account, I'm forced to use Google's viewer before I could download. I wish gmail let me decide whether I want to download or view.

I found about this a week ago and it kicks ass. It really helps when you are working with scientific information which is all in PDF's.

Android does the same for PDF attachments

nice, i'll gmail myself my pdf ebooks

hrm strange I commented on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396485 with this. bug? It is a list of top 100 urls ever registered. I just though stargate.com was odd being #20.