Truly revolutionary tech
You say in jest, but this simple upgrade very likely improves the lives of more people more significantly than some billion dollar unicorns ever do.
Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
91–100 of 384 posts
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your favorite PDF feature that causes a brain meltdown? 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!
At least it's probably better than MS-Word's internal format ... (?)
Microsoft Word stores XML documents inside a zip archive. There is a detailed specification of the format available: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/...
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#93I 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.
OK, they added various ways of data compression, but PDF is, basically, a text-based format. As far as I know, any PDF can be losslessly converted to an equivalent PDF that can be edited in any text editor, even Notepad. And yes, you could fill in the forms there, too (if you were stubborn enough)
It sounds like you either know a lot more than me or a lot less than me. The PDFs I've dealt with don't store text as strings, they store it as individual characters. This left me having to write a heuristic based algorithm to group the characters into words, words into lines, lines into paragraphs, paragraphs into columns.
Again, as far as I know, there are no heuristics good enough to get that right for all values of PDF.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#94Finally. Its a nightmere trying to fill out a pdf form on linux.
Okular can handle basically everything for me, except for those Adobe-proprietary ones that require JS and all kinds of other dumb features that only Acrobat supports.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#95I have a feeling this thread has a strong bias from highly automated valley life. In more provincial regions and even just much of Europe lots of forms have to be filled out and printed. It is not something you have to everyday or something, but the existing solutions suck massively. You either have to use Adobe, which requires Windows (or Mac, I suppose) and your firstborn or use some massively shady online service.…
Isn’t evince capable of this and the default PDF viewer on GNOME?
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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).
If Chrome doesn't use pdf.js, then neither would Edge, which is a Chrome fork. My original comment may have been mistaken.
A Chromium fork could replace certain components if they so choose. The PDF rendering component would be one of the easier ones to replace.
However, I was able to confirm that Edge uses extension ID mhjfbmdgcfjbbpaeojofohoefgiehjai to render PDF internally[1], same as Chrome, so indeed it's using PDFium.
[1] The rendered PDF element would look like
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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! I have never seen this. Do you have an example? Every use if fillable PDFs I have encountered is a use case where submitting a handwritten form is still an option. > The only benefit a client gets is the ability to edi…
The Canadian visa application form is an example.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work for US Federal courts, I can assure you html isn’t sufficient over PDF’s for court cases. Evidence are filed in pdfs. Documents (PDFs) need to be a historical archive, and the ability to modify would damage the credibility of those documents.
> ability to modify How are PDFs any less modifiable than HTML other than requiring (widely available) specialized tools instead of a text editor?
Cryptographic signing is a core feature of PDF, but not HTML.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
On the other hand, this allows for some incredible polyglot files, like some of the tricks with PoC||GtfO issues where the file is a readable PDF but also a game cartridge and also a zip file with the proof-of-concept code in the issue. And the front cover has the MD5 hash of the whole file printed on it... but that's another trick entirely!
Yeah, next time I need a CV it'll be a single-file Ruby web server and PDF that's also an archive of its own sources.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, they added various ways of data compression, but PDF is, basically, a text-based format. As far as I know, any PDF can be losslessly converted to an equivalent PDF that can be edited in any text editor, even Notepad. And yes, you could fill in the forms there, too (if you were stubborn enough)
It sounds like you either know a lot more than me or a lot less than me. The PDFs I've dealt with don't store text as strings, they store it as individual characters. This left me having to write a heuristic based algorithm to group the characters into words, words into lines, lines into paragraphs, paragraphs into columns. Again, as far as I know, there are no heuristics good enough to get that right for all values…
He knows a lot less than you probably because there is absolutely no requirements for PDFs to be in text format and most aren't. The "text" he is editing could render to completely different characters depending on how the PDF document was created.
The default MacOS PDF printer will actually remap the font cmap making born-digital PDFs where the "text" is something else entirely (say "$" maps to "a").