Simon Willison’s Weblog

Repolygonizing Fonts (via) Part of Scribd’s fascinating series of posts explaining how their document conversion technology works.

# 30th June 2010, 1:04 pm / fonts, scribd, recovered

Paper 5 | Scribd (via) A more impressive example of Scribd’s new HTML/CSS document viewer: a mathematics-heavy LaTeX paper by one of Scribd’s engineers.

# 7th May 2010, 12:12 pm / css, html, html5, latex, scribd, recovered

Scribd in HTML5. Outstanding piece of engineering work from Scribd—they can now render documents using HTML, webfonts and a ton of CSS absolute positioning (using ems rather than pixels) instead of Flash. Nothing to do with HTML5 of course, which is rapidly replacing Ajax as the most mis-applied terminology on the Web. That nit-pick feels pretty insignificant compared to their overall achievement though—being able to convert any formatted document (.doc, pdf etc) in to HTML and CSS that displays correctly is a real leap forward.

# 7th May 2010, 12:09 pm / css, css3, html, html5, scribd, recovered, webfonts

Scribd. This appears to be social software for the huge population of people who can’t imagine creating anything without using Word.

# 25th April 2007, 7:22 pm / bemused, scribd, socialsoftware, word