...have been difficulties in the rendering of those PDFs from the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Google today has moved closer to true harmony between the PDF and engine environment by introducing the Quick View link that is now applied to an increasing percentage of the PDFs now indexed by Google. The official Google blog tells us

Today, weve added new links to Quick View PDFs in your browser with the formatting intact. The new links are based on the same technology thats available in Google Docs and Gmail, as well as to webmasters through the Google Docs viewer. Weve been rolling this technology out to the search results page since July, and as of today weve added Quick View links to more than 50% of the PDFs in our index. The new links appear at the end of the second line of the result, right underneath the title.

As a result you can now view the PDF in the browser while keeping all the formatting in tact. No longer is there a need to download the PDF to get all of the formatting or viewing the PDF in HTML which sacrificed all of the formatting for the most part.

This is pretty cool and a good move toward making some of the barriers that have existed between certain techniques and the search engines (can you say Flash?) less of an issue. Isnt it nice to have less issues?

Del.icio.us

Digg

Reddit

Furl