The beta channel represents a step forward versus the developer channel, anyway.  Plus, although there are presumably some quirks left to iron out, it sounds like Google’s done a nice job of designing the viewer.

Software engineer John Abd-El-Malek wrote on the Google Chrome Blog today, "With the integrated Chrome PDF viewer now available in Chrome’s beta, you can open a PDF document in Chrome without installing additional software.  The PDF document will load as quickly and seamlessly as a normal web page in the browser."

Then Abd-El-Malek continued, "Just like we do with web pages viewed in Chrome, we’ve built in an additional layer of security called the ‘sandbox’ around the Chrome PDF viewer to help protect you from malware and security attacks that are targeted at PDF files."

So, sooner rather than later, it appears that normal Chrome users will get the opportunity to open legal documents, corporate reports, and all other sorts of stuff with a minimum of hassle.

Chrome may find new favor with businesspeople as a result.

Don’t run off to view a PDF in Chrome just yet – you probably won’t get too far no matter how up-to-date your software is.  And really, at this point, only true Chrome pioneers are meant to make use of the new feature.

But Marc Pawliger, an engineering director at Google, announced on the Chromium Blog, "[W]e are making available an integrated PDF viewing experience in the Chrome developer channel for Windows and Mac, which can be enabled by visiting chrome://plugins."

As for the next steps, Pawliger continued, "Linux support is on the way, and we will be enabling the integration by default in the developer channel in the coming weeks."  PDF rendering quality, which apparently isn’t quite yet up to par, is also a priority.

The Chrome team will even give people the option of separately launching Adobe Reader, as well.

These upgrades could help Chrome bridge the gap between early adopters and the rest of the world.  Or at the least, they should make the early adopters a little happier, and therefore more likely to stick with Chrome and eventually recommend it to others.

"In the past, the only way to view these documents was to download them and open them in a separate viewer application," says Google. "To provide an alternative, we made it possible to quickly and easily view these files as HTML right in a web browser by clicking ‘View as HTML.’ This was an improvement, but unfortunately the ‘View as HTML’ option loses some of the formatting from the original PDF, such as graphics, tables, fonts and other elements."

The new links are based on the same technology that is used by Google Docs and Gmail. Google says they’ve actually been rolling out the feature in search results since July, and now they have more than half of the PDFs in their index available this way.

When you click the "Quick View" link, it will open the PDF in your browser, and will look something like this:

Google recently gave webmasters a new way to display PDFs (as well as PPTs and TIFFs). They launched the Google Docs Viewer, which displays these types of files directly in a user’s web browser without requiring a download. The tool for this can be found here. 

"Last year, we added PDF upload and view to Google Docs, and the ‘View’ link for PDF attachments in Gmail," says Google software engineer Jesse Kinkead. "We also added support for viewing PowerPoint and TIFF files in Gmail this April. Feedback on these features has been very positive – viewing files right in your browser is fast, and it keeps your downloads folder clean. Plus, it spares you the hassle of saving your files to the machine you’re using, which could be a shared or public computer."

To use the Google Docs Viewer, simply go to the site and provide Google with the URL to your file. You can also include optional link text.

You can also generate code for an embedded viewer like the one below.

Box.net users can use the service to view documents stored within their Boxes, by adding the Google Docs Viewer OpenBox Service to their account.

"If you want, you can still view in plain HTML from a link at the top of the new viewer," adds Miller. "And if you want to download, save, and view your PDFs later while offline using client software, you can still do that by hitting the ‘Download’ link."

This is just the latest enhancement to Gmail intended for improving the user experience, and no doubt trying to trim off some of that email market share that Yahoo is still clinging to. We’ve seen a lot of features being added to gmail lately.

They have recently added SMS capability, voice and video chat, a tasks feature, and a desktop gadget that allows you to login to multiple accounts simultaneously.

How it works:

1. Enter at least one RSS Feed

2. Select Your Delivery Options

3. On schedule, they email you a print-ready PDF

Publishers that want their feeds to be compatible with Tabbloid may have to make some adjustments. When I experimented with it to see what our own WebProNews feeds looked like in it, I got the common excerpt format, and for those printing out PDFs to read paper versions, they’re not going to be able to click on "read more", so they’re not going to be able to read the full content.

Publishers that offer full content in their feeds would presumably fit right into this, though I would imagine it would use a whole lot of paper. Amit Agarwal suggests mobile uses:

You may find this very useful if your old smartphone can send & receive emails but has no built-in feed reader. Just get your favorite sites as a PDF file in your email and read the new content at leisure without your laptop.

I don’t know how often people are going to want their feeds in a PDF format, but HP making the option available can’t hurt.

As Google says, while reading the scanned text may be very easy for a human, it’s a very error-prone process for a computer, so it is unlikely that this will be a flawless endeavor. In a post on the Official Google Blog, Product Manager Erin Levey elaborates a little bit on what Google’s doing:

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful.

While we’ve indexed documents saved as PDFs for some time now, scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. Scanning is the reverse of printing. Printing turns digital words into text on paper, while scanning makes a digital picture of the physical paper (and text) so you can store and view it on a computer. The scanned picture of the text is not quite the same as the original digital words, however — it is a picture of the printed words. Often you can see telltale signs: the ring of a coffee cup, ink smudges, or even fold creases in the pages.

Google invites us to take a look at some results that incorporate these listings (noticing the document excerpts):

– repairing aluminum wiring
– spin lock performance
– Mumps and Severe Neutropenia
– Steady success in a volatile world

This project ought to save some people a lot of typing. I can’t help but wonder if this will contribute to Google Book Search pages coming up in regular search results in the future. Perhaps this was a big motivator for Google to do this in the first place. Just speculation.