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Ask HN: What (do you think) Scribd / DocStoc uses to convert pdf/docs into swf?
2 points by buggy_code 6232 days ago
(And what are the best open source alternatives).

We're setting up something private for sharing documents.

Thanks!

3 comments

I found in a job posting:

iPaper is an unusually complex Flash application with many highly technical components.

http://www.scribd.com/jobs/7

So it looks proprietary.

Looks like they started with something like http://www.swftools.org/ and developed a custom viewer for the swf files.

For doc and other formats, one can use openoffice commandline tools to convert them all to pdf.

edit: Some history - http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9874527-2.html Scribd initially used the now discontinued flash paper.

edit: some variant of swftools ? others have more info?