Biomedical PDFs

Alf @ Hublog did a quick survey of the PDFs available from a variety of different biomedical publishers. He looked at things like authentication methods, whether or not simple metadata was included in the PDF document properties and what the default filename for downloaded PDFs was. The results are quite interesting.

None of the publishers did everything right, even though none of the things Alf was looking for are particularly difficult to implement. BioMedCentral came quite close, but then they're an internet based publisher, so perhaps you'd expect that.

I have an inherent hatred of all things PDF, mainly because my PC at work has a strange problem with embedding Acrobat in Firefox (it hangs for up to a minute whenever I click on a link that leads to a PDF). I've always preferred to just capture the relevant fulltext HTML with the ScrapBook extension, set to capture the appropriate depth of links.