Powering better online document viewing
Viewing PDF and Microsoft Office documents on a Web browser can cause slow loading and messy formatting — and often such documents won’t load at all. Most times, users will simply download the documents to their computers to read and annotate a clean copy. This type of thing doesn’t happen with, say, videos and images, because file-sharing websites, such as YouTube and Flickr, can convert various uploaded file types into a format supported by all browsers. Now tech startup Crocodoc, founded by MIT engineering and computer science alumni, has developed online tools that convert an array of document formats into HTML, making these files easily viewed and shared — much like videos and images — across the Web, and on any device. “We’ve spent an enormous amount of time understanding documents at a very deep level so that we can reconstruct them in your Web browser or mobile device in...