171100 - Integrate PDF viewing into the browser

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[S Woodside]

PDF display is available for free with the Quartz display engine on OS X. This
request is to integrate PDF display into the browser, using the Quartz PDF
rendering engine to display the PDF. The PDF would appear within the browser
window, in a similar way to Acrobat integration with the browser on many windows
browsers.

For an open source (GPL) implementation of an NSView subclass that at first
glance, seems to include widgets and be well abstracted, see:
http://www.u-bourgogne.fr/monge/j.laurens/iTeXMac/Download.html

In 10.2 the PDF rendering engine seems to be pretty comparable to me in basic
rendering of a variety of documents; however it seems slower than acrobat in
very complex documents. This may be because acrobat display "asynchronously"
while the basic quartz PDF view apparently does not.

Comment 1

[Greg K.]

I don't know about this. Adobe should provide an Acrobat plug-in, and I imagine
that would suffice for most people. Why Adobe's so tardy with this plug-in for
OS X is beyond me, though.

Comment 2

[S Woodside]

IMHO it would be better just to get a plug-in from adobe. But until that
happens, according to a few people (including me) it should be "pretty easy" to
install this as a workaround or whatever.

Comment 3

[Greg K.]

FYI, there is a third-party PDF plug-in available:
http://www.schubert-it.com/download/

Comment 4

[Sören 'Chucker' Kuklau (gone)]

And it looks like it works like a charm. "Installation" is just moving that file
to the Internet Plug-Ins folder, just as it should be. Chimera picked it up
without a browser restart.

And yet it may be a good idea to make use of OS X's integrated PDF technology.
Wouldn't this be quite a lot faster than a plug-in?

Therefore, confirming.

Comment 5

[S Woodside]

Yeah, this really isn't necessary any more. Manfred's plug in is great.