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Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

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Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#271

Post by xfer »

mkl wrote: post #267
quickthrowman wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s news to me and Bluebeam’s PDF search feature! It turns out you can make PDFs (This usually happens with architectural drawings) that are comprised purely of images that are not searchable, and therefore you are wrong. I silently thank every architect that provides searchable PDFs, it makes my job way easier

GP is right. The code that makes up a PDF is text-based. Those images can be encoded in the PDF file using the ASCIIHexDecode filter, i.e. as editable ASCII text code.

Yes just use a hex editor and every data is text-based.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#272

Post by ehsankia »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #203
vcxy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Find the earliest valid pdf in consecutive digits of pi"

Please don't give them any ideas.. the whiteboard interview coding tests are hard enough as it is

Doesn't sound like that hard of a question, given you are provided the structure of the PDF header. I guess it really comes down to substring search.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#273

Post by gedy »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #203
vcxy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Find the earliest valid pdf in consecutive digits of pi"

Please don't give them any ideas.. the whiteboard interview coding tests are hard enough as it is

How else will we weed out the fakers and people coasting for 10 years? Our CRUD SaaS app needs top people.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#274

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

kebman wrote: post #15

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.

Did you look at this:

https://github.com/catseye/pdf.lua

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#275

Post by belval »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #265
belval wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never dug deeper into it, so I am not aware of why it does that or if it's a specific version or whatnot, but take a PDF from which you can extract the text (with pdftotext/pdfbox for example). Open it in the document viewer and "print" it to PDF. If you extract the text again it is not readable anymore. This wouldn't be an issue if it was a conscious choice, but when I parsed a lot of born-digital PDFs we ended up…

Could it be “compacting” the fonts? So if U+0000 to U+0007F aren’t used at all, remove those glyphs and set U+0000’s glyph to be what was U+0080? Yes, I know NULL doesn’t have a glyph, but I hope that gets the idea across.

That would be my personal guess yes, as there are other ways to "protect" PDF text like curve-based rendering.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#276

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

bad_user wrote: post #217
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is a nice feature added to a basically-reasonable implementation of a PDF viewer. I think the objection is that that PDF viewer should be an actual independent application, not baked into a browser that already is too many things to too many people. It's like Chrome including a basic antivirus function ( https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2765944?co=GENIE.Pl... ) - yes it's useful, yes I trust it more…

No, it's like Chrome including a PDF viewer.

I expect that people who object to bundling a PDF viewer in Firefox object equally to Chrome doing the same.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#277

Post by arh68 »

mettamage wrote: post #68
kebman wrote: post #15

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.

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!

"Identical" PDFs are not necessarily byte-identical; you can't just check equivalence through checksums. (AFAIK, it's been a while, feel free to correct) I don't remember a good way to normalize/disambiguate, at least I never attacked the problem long enough to have learned.

EDIT: oh yeah, I'm pretty sure it contains Mail, just like Zawinski said

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#278

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #227
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is a nice feature added to a basically-reasonable implementation of a PDF viewer. I think the objection is that that PDF viewer should be an actual independent application, not baked into a browser that already is too many things to too many people. It's like Chrome including a basic antivirus function ( https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2765944?co=GENIE.Pl... ) - yes it's useful, yes I trust it more…

I really don't see why it should be an independent application. I mean it's not like we expect a PNG viewer or HTML5 video viewer to be a separate application in a browser. Being able to view (and in this case fill/interact with) PDFs is pretty much a basic necessity on the web. Beyond the core HN crowd, almost nobody cares to have a 3rd party application that they have to install to view PDFs in their browser. Havin…

> I mean it's not like we expect a PNG viewer or HTML5 video viewer to be a separate application in a browser.

PDFs are generally an actual document, separate from the site they're on. If images and videos weren't a part of the web pages being viewed, I would be quite skeptical of including them in the browser. I mean, there are JS viewers for STL files (https://www.viewstl.com/) - should browsers include a 2D modeling environment?

> Beyond the core HN crowd, almost nobody cares to have a 3rd party application that they have to install to view PDFs in their browser.

See, I have the exact opposite experience; I've had less-technical family complain to me they were annoyed at Firefox because it stopped just opening PDFs in Adobe and forced them into a crippled slow viewer inside itself. Unfortunately, I can't tell which of us is in a bubble.

> Having a lightweight and secure PDF viewer that is also not made by some 3rd party company that could be collecting any amount of data on you is a good thing in general.

That many PDF viewers are awful is an argument for making a better PDF viewer, but not for baking it into a browser.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#279

Post by phonon »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #266

Will it support only the standardised kind of forms, or also the proprietary Adobe-only kind of forms? (Yes, there's two, and the latter are what Swedish administrative agencies use, so I'm forced to choose the “non-fillable PDF” option lest I get a file intentionally made unreadable to non-Adobe software.)

Only the standardized acroforms. XFA forms are deprecated anyway...

http://blog.pdfshareforms.com/pdf-2-0-release-bid-farewell-x...

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#280

Post by zapzupnz »

jiveturkey wrote: post #236
dgellow wrote: post #168

A note for Linux and macOS users, from someone who switched to windows one year ago: it’s maybe surprising but it is a VERY REAL pain in the Windows world to find a pdf reader that also allows you to edit forms, that doesn’t also come with malware or adware, and has even just a modest UX! So for sure you already have access to Evince and Preview.app, they already do everything you want, but Windows users don’t really…

eh? acroread is very easily found.

If you've heard of it, sure. If you know of it, sure. If you know it's better than the competing options available for Windows, sure.
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