Thanks for the link. We include a direct download link right on the page but ...

We made a conscious business decision to skip having ads, to not have a paywall, and even to let you view and download 100% registration free because it's what we believe in. But hotlinking PDFs on highly trafficked places has a huge negative impact on an already very tight budget. Using our viewer, or only downloading if you're actually interested in the docs, saves a lot of money and helps us continue our government transparency work ad- and paywall-free.

Thanks!

You should consider building a viewer that's usable on mobile devices then. It's nearly impossible to read your document on a phone.

Additionally, I couldn't find the PDF link from my phone either.

Thanks a lot for the feedback: Download links are right under the thumbnails of the respective file, but I'll work to add them in the main document view, too:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/62n8umb9jcaqfv4/Screenshot%202014-...

We are definitely working on a better viewer, with a mobile redesign due in a few months, but we don't have any full time developers on staff: My cofounder and I both have day jobs, and our main focus is making sure we continue to get and publish government records as efficiently and openly as possible.

The reality is also just that there aren't really any great PDF viewers we've found on the web, though we're definitely open to suggestions/inspiration if you have one you think works really well.

I'd recommend having a play around with PDF.js from Mozilla, it's the default PDF viewer in Firefox, and is open source and lightweight.

http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/

I couldn't figure out how to read the document in Chrome for Windows either. At least... I don't think I was reading it. I just saw a bunch of garbled text.

How about using a torrent then?

Since we have a lot of "longtail" documents, torrents aren't a great solution for reaching a mass audience + making sure we can reliably offer access to 339,957 pages of various government documents in tens of thousands of PDFs.

We are actively looking at doing monthly dumps, a la StackOverflow, of all our documents and data, and we'd like to do that via Torrent. As soon as I get a few day to hack on it ...