Why won't PDFs open in Google Chrome?

Why is Google Chrome so terrible at printing pdfs?

• I'm not angry, I'm just trying to understand. (Chrome in general is awesome!)

• Answer:

  Based on my little (read almost nil) experience . It is bad because Transforming HTML/CSS to PDF  is difficult. Not because it in itself is a difficult task but because of the DOM. No one seems to agree on how the DOM should be rendered . Add to the fact that PDF standard is just as complicated and difficult to get a consensus on things. Secondly its not easy to implement  "What you see is what you get" (WYSWIG for all you hippies). When there is a crap load of javascript and complicated UIs to deal with. Because before giving the data to the PDF component all that goo has to be "handled" and rendered especially for pdf and then printed. And don't even get me started on SVG. My point is this Its "bad" because of all these variables. unfortunately the web is full of these. Almost Forgot: My experiences involved a implementing fairly simple download as pdf feature.(expect to me implementing it was neither fair or simple.) For which I had tried a number of OSS and Proprietary Libraries and none of them seemed to deliver exactly what we wanted.