How Scribd's HTML5 conversion works ... even when it shouldn't

My respect for how hard it is to convert from .pdf to HTML just went waaaay up. Scribd must have really thought displaying in HTML5 was worth a lot of trouble if they went to all this effort to be precise!

I don't have any particular use for Scribd but I love them anyway.<p>Any company that can kick Adobe in the nuts by publicly reconfiguring their business to shun Flash is all right with me. And what technical prowess these guys have. Incredibly smart people there.

Weirdness. They have a section titled "Detecting the font family", where they're supposedly comparing Trebuchet and Courier, but in the example they show Trebuchet and <i>Myriad</i>.

Idle thought - would it be possible using layers to do selectable text in an image - top layer is 100% transparent text, 2nd layer is the image. The font face is preserved (though it still won't wrap), but the text is still selectable for copy and paste.

I don't find being able to view the mangled pdf on screen worth the time saved downloading the actual pdf. With video and audio I can understand the benefit of in-browser viewing, but why do we need this service for pdfs anyway?

Matthias At Work