Last week Google announced that they’ve integrated their Google Docs PDF viewer with their search results; one more step that shows how ubiquitous, and how useful, PDFs are becoming. I had some time to explore it a bit today, and it does seem to work very nicely … but with a few quirks that may or may not be temporary.

Google’s been proud of the eternal beta status of much of their software (except where that might adversely affect adoption by businesses, of course), and the beta status of this integration is fairly clear. Many PDFs still have the “view as HTML” link, rather than the simple “view” link for files they now support as PDF. It looks as if they may have started with files on .edu and .org domains, although that might be an accidental artefact of their web crawlers. I also found that the majority of PDF files that showed up in my searches with a “view” link would start Google Docs and then give me a message that they were unavailable, with the option to fall back to the old HTML display. Undoubtedly these are both just temporary issues while the service goes live.

More seriously, I found a few PDF files where the letter spacing looked very odd. Well positioned characters can aid both reading speed and comprehension, while badly spaced characters mean that you spend more of your brain power on the mechanics of reading and less on what the words actually mean. It wasn’t a very common problem in Google Docs, but the PDFs affected displayed just fine in Acrobat and in gDoc Fusion, so it wasn’t the files themselves. I suspect it may have been related to poor emulation of fonts that were not embedded in the PDFs. I’m afraid that I don’t read any far eastern languages, so I didn’t look at what happens with text in Japanese!

But the problem that gave me most pause for thought occurred to me when I was trying to dig a bit deeper into the character spacing. Let’s say there’s a PDF file on the web that I want to open in Google Docs; there’s a link to it right under where I’m hovering my cursor in my web browser. How do I open it? It would be painful to have to construct a search that will find that PDF file directly. There’s an add-on for Firefox that’s supposed to add an item to your context menu to send a PDF file to Google Docs by right-clicking on a link to it, but the reviews are unanimous in saying that it is incompatible with the current release. If you start in Google Docs itself you can ‘upload’ a file by pasting in a URL, but that’s a very clunky workflow. It also adds the file to your library, which may not be what you want if you’re trying to quickly skim through a number of documents.

In conclusion, I can see that Google Docs support for PDFs and its integration into search will have real value for an initial quick review of search results. It may also be very useful for anyone who’s looking at keeping their document store in the cloud, perhaps because they want to access it from many different computers. It has a way to go yet before it could be regarded as a serious option for general PDF reading for most of us, though.

Martin