pdf.js, VisualSearch.js, Voice Debugger
pdf.js: Rendering PDF with HTML5 and JavaScript
In pdf.js: Rendering PDF with HTML5 and JavaScript Andreas Gal discusses a project to determine if HTML5 is complete enough to render PDFs. The GitHub pdf.js project contains progress so far, and it looks like Andreas is updating it regularly.
There’s also another related post, Overview of pdf.js guts, which explains how it works:
pdf.js (currently) parses raw arrays of bytes into streams of PDF “bytecode”, compiles the bytecode into JavaScript programs, then executes the programs. Yes, it’s a sort of PDF JIT. The side effect of those programs is to draw on an HTML5 Canvas.
It sounds like a fascinating project, particularly the PDF stream parsing.
VisualSearch.js
VisualSearch.js (GitHub: documentcloud / visualsearch, License) from DocumentCloud is a novel take on search design. It allows field-level options to be specified using dynamic inline completion, using simple icons and drop-down menus.
Voice Debugger
Voice Debugger (GitHub: ferrante / Voice-Debugger) by Damian Wielgosik is a little HTML5 experiment to catch JavaScript errors and read them out. A set of standard errors are saved as WAV files, and then played with an audio tag.
I’ve been doing some pretty heavy HTML audio work lately, so I found this extremely amusing…
