Just testing pdfmenot.com - a tool from the people behind bugmenot.com, retailmenot.com and cushycms.com. It lets you read a PDF in your browser without downloading it, and even embed a pdf in another page with a bit of javascript. Also trying out an alternative, vuzit.com.

I’m partial to the simplicity of pdfmenot - just add a prefix of “http://pdfmenot.com/view/" to a PDF to view it. And the embedding is a tiny bit of javascript. Vuzit on the other hand requires an API key to be embedded in the iframe. Vuzit does pick up the right zoom level automatically, which is a plus - and with a bit of work could be set up with my own logo/branding. PDFmenot seems to be one size fits all.

PDFmenot seems aimed more at the user - making PDF viewing simple for anyone who doesn’t want to download a PDF to view it. Vuzit seems more geared to the developer with a HUGE javascript API that can handle all sorts of fine control, making embedding documents very powerful. I’d use vuzit in a large CMS, pdfmenot for simple sites (like mine). ¹