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Truly revolutionary tech
Well, it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package, so in a way—yes.
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Given that Chrome/Edge also just added the feature, I would point out: All web browsers are using the same library for PDF handling, a feature in pdf.js ends up benefiting a lot of people. And the reasons for not requiring an outside PDF reader are major: It's yet another likely-to-have-vulnerabilities program people need to install, then update. In most cases, avoiding Adobe programs on your PC is a good way to avoi…
> All web browsers are using the same library for PDF handling Chrome/Chromium uses PDFium, not PDF.js, so no. Not sure about Edge. PDFium has been able to fill out forms for a long time. What’s new for Chrome is the ability to save edited PDF (as fillable).
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Printing is one use case. Also plenty places that want filled out forms uploaded, e-mailed, ... + it allows you to keep a copy with what you entered.
That's my point. Other than printing a nice looking form (which includes faxing), the content of the field data is hard to reuse. Searching PDF content on your own hard drive is problematic. Are there utilities that extract PDF field data and submit it to a database? I'd be grateful to see examples. What about field validation? The PDF may have some minor validation, but that's no substitute for the validation done i…
A lot of people don't care, because they come from forms in cartaceous - where they have to manually retype everything anyway. For many, their "DBMS" will be an Excel sheet with a dozen rows. The more advanced types likely have some Adobe software that does all the magic.
Fillable PDF forms are really seen as a courtesy to users more than anything particularly useful to the emitter.
I looked into coding PDFs once. Then I closed my MacBook (Pro) and went for a long walk into the ocean. I think I almost got to America, but then I turned and swam back again. Turnd out I had just fallen asleep and had a nightmare. I was actually just working with regular text files, and everything was fine.
My favourite PDF fact is that it doesn't have to start at the beginning or end at the end of a file. Any sea of bytes that contains a PDF file is an acceptable PDF file...
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> 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.
> It has plenty of advantages over HTML but they're easy to dismiss if you don't have a use case for them. Can you discuss some of the advantages? The only advantage that comes to mind is that Apple has built-in support for writing PDFs and that has a lot to do with Adobe rather than PDF being a better candidate.
I looked into coding PDFs once. Then I closed my MacBook (Pro) and went for a long walk into the ocean. I think I almost got to America, but then I turned and swam back again. Turnd out I had just fallen asleep and had a nightmare. I was actually just working with regular text files, and everything was fine.
I've read a few comments on HN how PDF is, well, not developer-friendly. If people are interested in providing some more examples here, I'd be curious to know!
Is there something hard about fillable forms on PDF? Why have a PDF viewer at all if it couldn't fill out a form?
And implementing a PDF viewer is already a major undertaking; adding the form functionality complicates things even more.
Is there something hard about fillable forms on PDF? Why have a PDF viewer at all if it couldn't fill out a form?
While PDF is an open format on paper, in practice it's as proprietary as any ancient format. Supporting it in full is not trivial.
If we simply had print-to-HTML functionality which resulted in a document identical to what you view onscreen while editing, PDF could die the death it deserves.
But HTML+CSS somehow manages to suck just as much for common usage, so it persists.