[chengchang]

The majority of scientific and technical papers are delivered by the PDF file for portable presentation. However, it difficult to read the PDF paper on small screen devices, such as tablets and eBook readers.

So I wrote PDFlower to reflow PDF papers for small-screen reading.

Compared with plain-text extraction based tools, PDFlower reconstructs the object level - columns, formulas, tables and figures - layout using some smart heuristics, and then renders them for new page size.

[eranation]

Great idea and actual pain point. Showing a live or even a video demo will increase sign up significantly IMHO. Also the "get started now" should lead to the sign up page, not sign in page.

I like minimalist design, but this is a little too minimalist. More pictures, how it works, examples, pricing, will be great. Also no clue if this is an IOS app, android app, mobile web app, desktop app.

So congrats on the building and shipping attitude, but to take advantage of the flow of beta users from HN, I'd say a video / demo and more "faq" is going to increase your conversion tenfold.

Well done on the launch in any case, better launch something than wait till it's perfect.

[ericmo]

Example pictures are kind of small, hard to see the quality of the result. Also, I'd use this for a Kindle device, not an iPad, so it'd be also good to see how it looks in a Kindle.

[chengchang]

- The output is a reflowed PDF. It keeps 'PDF quality'. - Any PDF reader/device could display new version paper technically. - Kindle has supported.

[WhitneyLand]

Does up let you resize fonts?

[gcr]

Seconded. I have bad vision; I would love to use this to resize the fonts in single-column PDFs that I read.

Equivalently, I would love to reduce the column width to make zooming easier.

I prefer two-column format specifically because the columns are typically much narrower (less words per line), so I can zoom them to fill the screen and read much more comfortably than a single column document with 50 words per line.

[kbumsik]

Well just a single small example in the homepage is not enough to convence me to sign up and try.

[lmg643]

why do we need to create an account to try it out?

[wccrawford]

Reading the page, it looks like your document gets put into a queue for processing, and then you can download it after. I imagine they wanted to avoid all the hassles of emails, as well as having accounts to prime the system if they decide to enhance it as a for-pay service.

It probably also stops assholes from using the service on PDFlower's dime for their own needs.

[halomru]

There are plenty of services that put my job in a queue and simply update the page via JavaScript to show progress and deliver the end result. The better implementations identify me via session cookie and recognize me when I check back half an hour later to get my results. That's a much nicer experience than creating another account at some random service that I might never visit again.

[maxxxxx]

PDF is easily the worst file format I have ever dealt with. It's hard to believe that somehow this format became an industry standard.

You are a brave man/woman for dealing with this.