The tireless guys and gals at Google have just made Gmail even better by adding PDF viewing support. The new feature lets you view PDFs in your browser without the need to have a PDF reader locally installed on your machine. Simply click on the ‘View’ button next to the PDF attachment in an email message and the PDF will be opened in a new window. 

The actual PDF is not displayed in the browser — instead it’s converted to an image (potentially using gsview) and displayed in a document-like form. The final representation of the original PDF is pretty decent, indeed, it’s much better than Google’s previous efforts at converting PDFs to HTML as a quick-view solution for PDFs.

The down-side is that because it’s no longer technically a PDF, features such as JavaScript, form-fields, bookmarks and links are absent. The up-side is that theoretically it should be easier and quicker to view PDFs in your email.

Google first unveiled their PDF viewing technology a few months ago in Google Docs, now they’ve added it to Gmail –what’s next, PDF viewing support for Google Search?

Related Posts:
• Finally, Native PDF Support for the Kindle
• Google your PDFs
• Adobe Reader + Windows 7 — Browser viewing still dead.

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