FINALLY! Now I can finally uninstall Chrome. Of course, I do wish Sumatra supported filling forms. Then I could uninstall Firefox too! ;-)
Okular works quite well for filling forms in my experience :)
Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
21–30 of 384 posts
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it extremely convenient. Also I know a lot of security issues in PDF viewers are effectively solved by running it in the browser's JS sandbox.
You could also disable Firefox's built-in PDF viewer and instead use an external PDF viewer that doesn't even support Javascript.
You misunderstand the argument the parent comment makes. It's not about Javscript in PDFs.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it extremely convenient. Also I know a lot of security issues in PDF viewers are effectively solved by running it in the browser's JS sandbox.
You could also disable Firefox's built-in PDF viewer and instead use an external PDF viewer that doesn't even support Javascript.
Not all PDF vulnerabilities involve JS though.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#24Truly revolutionary tech
Well, it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package, so in a way—yes.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#25Why is Firefox spending all their money and goodwill on a piece of technology that should be done away with? PDF is a dork. It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages. Somewhere in the comments below, it is mentioned that supporting PDFs is a non-trivial piece of technology. May be! Even steam engines have non-trivial technology under the hood.
There are lots of use cases for PDF where a web page is totally unsuitable.
As someone working on formats, I disagree with your generalization. But let's get into specifics. List the things about PDF that you believe can't be done with web pages?
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#26Is there something hard about fillable forms on PDF? Why have a PDF viewer at all if it couldn't fill out a form?
> Is there something hard about fillable forms on PDF?
In the sense of a “form” just being lines on paper that you can arbitrarily add some text to — no, that’s easy.
Likewise, in the sense of a “form” being some defined input regions that accept your keystrokes and turn them into new text DOM nodes in the PDF itself — easy enough. Though, unlike HTML, there’s no concept of an tag that just has the semantics of accepting keystrokes and turning them into (persisted) input; instead, this all has to be done through scripting [i.e. writing event-handlers, or having some PDF authoring software generate them]; and there are several incompatible scripting languages for PDF that get used, some of which are proprietary with no open specification.
But, doing form validation? Or, worse yet, making one of those fancy PDF forms that auto-calculates fields like an Excel spreadsheet? Now you’re getting into the hairy stuff, because IIRC none of the open-standard PDF scripting systems provide these sorts of mechanisms, so these are inherently proprietary things.
And when I say “proprietary”, I mean “like old versions of Word or Photoshop, where each version emitted its own in-memory data-structures to disk without formal serialization; and it was the job of authors of future versions to write importers to deserialize whatever format resulted.”
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#27Why is Firefox spending all their money and goodwill on a piece of technology that should be done away with? PDF is a dork. It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages. Somewhere in the comments below, it is mentioned that supporting PDFs is a non-trivial piece of technology. May be! Even steam engines have non-trivial technology under the hood.
> It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages.
It is easy to criticize something when you don't look back at the historical context through which it emerged. It has plenty of advantages over HTML but they're easy to dismiss if you don't have a use case for them.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#28“After entering data into these fields you can download the file to have the filled out version saved to your computer.”
What’s the use case? Printing out filled-in forms? But otherwise, who would want the PDF in electronic format? It doesn’t seem like a practical way for users to submit data.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#29Why is Firefox spending all their money and goodwill on a piece of technology that should be done away with? PDF is a dork. It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages. Somewhere in the comments below, it is mentioned that supporting PDFs is a non-trivial piece of technology. May be! Even steam engines have non-trivial technology under the hood.
There are lots of use cases for PDF where a web page is totally unsuitable.
Yes, maybe generally; but let’s talk about the specific case here — filling of complex PDF forms.
When a PDF that has interactive form fields, calculated auto-populated fields, fields that are enabled/disabled according to the inputs of other fields, etc. — the organization that created it (usually government or education) usually does that because they want you to fill it out using a PDF viewer; save it (which will persist the form inputs “into” the resulting PDF); and then submit the modified PDF file back to them. They want this, because they can use automated backend processes to extract the data from the PDF. They don’t want you to just print out the thing and fill it out. In fact, many such “fillable” PDFs start off in a state with many of their form-fields disabled and voided, such that printing them out in that state would result in a form you can’t really write on!
So, at that point, why didn’t they just make the PDF a web page? They’ve essentially reinvented a web form, but with extra steps. The only benefit a client gets is the ability to edit and save the form offline (but that can be done in a browser, too, with local storage); and furthermore, the ability to treat the resulting filled form as a file, moving it around before you submit it. But the cases where you need that are very niche, compared to the cases where you can just direct employees to your Intranet portal.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are lots of use cases for PDF where a web page is totally unsuitable.
As someone working on formats, I disagree with your generalization. But let's get into specifics. List the things about PDF that you believe can't be done with web pages?
It's easy to dismiss things in their entirety and then require someone else to "prove you wrong". Why don't you prove you're right instead?
Why don't you list all of things that PDFs can do that can also be done with web pages?