[jehu]

I have looked pretty carefully at the features on Apple's site that deal with the new Preview in Panther, but I have not seen mention of it integrated into Safari as a plugin. I have been using the SchuberIt plugin for Safari to date and it works well. Does anyone know if Apple is planning on providing a PDF plugin for Safari? I searched the forums in the past and did not find anything. Any of you pre-release testers out there know what the standard Internet Plugins directory on Panther looks like?

Thanks in advance

[- - e r i k - -]

Are you talking about PDF-previewing in Panther? In that case you don't need any plugin, as QuickTime already supports this. Turn this on in the QuickTime-control panel, MIME-types. I don't even think you need Panther to do this

[Millennium]

And what, pray tell, is wrong with the current setup? You gain nothing by bloating Safari with support for a format which has perfectly good viewers bundled with the OS already, and with a document paradigm that isn't appropriate for a browser anyway.

[jehu]

Originally posted by Millennium:
And what, pray tell, is wrong with the current setup? You gain nothing by bloating Safari with support for a format which has perfectly good viewers bundled with the OS already, and with a document paradigm that isn't appropriate for a browser anyway.

True. If Preview is as fast as it claims to be in starting up, then a plugin for the browser may not be needed. I have been using the plugin because it is too slow to wait for the external viewer (Acrobat or even Jaguar Preview) to launch. I don't have a problem with external viewers, in fact it is nice to keep using the browser window and have the document open in its own window.

[clarkgoble]

The problem with the default setup is that many of us browse PDFs the way we do HTML and want our PDFs in tabs the way our HTML is. Further we want to use the back and forward buttons. Ideally I'd like to see more Office formats done in browser as well -- especially power point.

There are documents I want to download and treat like a downloaded document. And there are documents I want to just browse and read without having to locate and delete by hand.

It really depends upon how you encounter PDFs. I encounter so many that are basically just an other way to display the data that I prefer they be treated that way.

There is a PDF plug-in you can add, but it doesn't work that well all the time. This is one of the few things I like better about IE on Windows than Safari.

[JKT]

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
There is a PDF plug-in you can add, but it doesn't work that well all the time. This is one of the few things I like better about IE on Windows than Safari.

But the PDF-plugin in IE in Windows is nothing to do with IE - it is an Adobe application. The question should be when is Adobe going to produce a plug-in for Safari, not when is Apple going to do so. The answer, I suspect, is going to be never but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The SchubertIt PDF plugin is presumably using current MacOS X features to do its stuff - with the advancement in PDF support in Panther, I would imagine that it will also be upgraded to a similar level of features.

[Cadaver]

Originally posted by Millennium:
And what, pray tell, is wrong with the current setup? You gain nothing by bloating Safari with support for a format which has perfectly good viewers bundled with the OS already, and with a document paradigm that isn't appropriate for a browser anyway.

The thing I like about a browser plug-in is that I don't have to go digging around in the Finder to delete the PDF's I only wanted to look at for two seconds...

If I want to keep a PDF, then I'll download it. If I just want to look at it and go back, I don't want to leave the browser.

The Shubert PDF VIewer plug in works great for this.