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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

#291

Post by marvindanig »

minerjoe wrote: post #248
marvindanig wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, here's my list: everything + more. There's nothing a PDF can do that a webpage can't. In fact there are a hundred of things that a webpage can do, but a PDF can't. Including, form fields, input fields and seamless form submissions. Webpages can also do this: https://bubblin.io/cover/official-handbook-by-marvin-danig#f... Disclosure: It's my work.

Wish I could look at your work but my browser doesn't support javascript. I wonder what it is about.

Those books do work without javascript. Go troll someone else.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#292

Post by xvilka »

phonon wrote: post #279
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...

In theory. In practice you still can meet the XFA forms, especially for some governmental organizations.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#294

Post by rossdavidh »

boringg wrote: post #170

Can we just step away from PDFs to a better standard? Every time I deal with PDFs or I have to on behalf of my parents it is a true waste of time and resources - there has to be a better way.

Just in case you were looking for an actual answer to your question: "no".

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#295

Post by _coveredInBees »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #278
_coveredInBees wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mode…

> 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.

See, I don't really agree with that because to me, PDFs are a pretty core part of content on the internet that users browse to via their browser. Pretty much every restaurant makes their menu available on their website as a PDF document. Almost all users will interact with PDF documents while browsing the web at some point or the other. Otoh, a tiny fraction will even know what an STL file is, let alone care about opening/viewing one. So that comparison really isn't a fair one.

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

That's a bit of an odd statement. If anything, it proves exactly why this is a good move from Mozilla. The PDF standard has been around forever, and yet there is a dearth of free, high-quality PDF viewers that aren't bloated or filled with ads or spyware or trying to get you to upgrade to a paid version of their software. So Mozilla has finally taken matters into their own hands and provided a pretty good, light-weight and integrated solution that will do the job for most users. Power users who care can still enable other software via the plugin system as their default PDF viewer. I'm not sure how you can blame Mozilla for addressing a very real deficiency in the state of available software for PDF viewing.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#296

Post by [deleted] »

willis77 wrote: post #74
TeMPOraL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone try to pluck out PDFs from /dev/urandom? How about from radiotelescope feed? Maybe the first evidence of extraterrestrial life will be some poor alien's tax form?

The digits of pi contain every pdf that ever could and ever will exist.

[deleted]

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#297

Post by egocodedinsol »

willis77 wrote: post #74
TeMPOraL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone try to pluck out PDFs from /dev/urandom? How about from radiotelescope feed? Maybe the first evidence of extraterrestrial life will be some poor alien's tax form?

The digits of pi contain every pdf that ever could and ever will exist.

I'm not sure that's necessarily true. It is true (at least with a non-constructive proof) that if you pick a 'random' real number then it contains all possible PDFs with probability one ( or that the set of numbers for which this is not true has lebesgue measure zero). But I'm not sure it's known that pi has this property.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#298

Post by modoc »

izacus wrote: post #133
mettamage wrote: post #68

Earlier 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!

Being able to do SQL queries to remote servers, upload form contents directly to a server, embedded 3D models and being able to have a fully featured page embedded Tetris game due to support for JS. Having said that (and worked on a commercial PDF library), despite all the cruft that came with age, it's a well built format that survived the test of time with good reasons.

Can chat with you about PDFs? devon at digitalsanctuary dot com

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#299

Post by Tagbert »

andrewzah wrote: post #233
eddiecalzone wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what you notice is missing in terms of feature parity. I'm mostly a back-end developer (not diving into devtools very often) and switched a year ago. I'm much happier and haven't looked back.

I just want support for APIs, mainly. I get websites from time to time that just refuse to load. E.g. * blank pages when trying to load an imgur gallery on v68 (esr). * image uploading not working right on instagram and various other sites, either producing blank images or ones with weird lines. * several teleconferencing / video meeting websites just don't work properly, whether it's not detecting hardware properly,…

This kind of problem also happens when developers only test on Chrome. Or if they are using Chrome-specific features and don’t properly handle failover.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#300

Post by Thorrez »

r00fus wrote: post #188
cgb223 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite pdf fact is that the security flags for things like copy protection and passwords are on the viewer to implement so you can just turn them off and all the security is gone

This is not entirely true, you can encrypt PDFs [1] since v1.3 of the spec but the cypher is often so weak (RC4 until v1.6) they can be bruteforced in reasonable amounts of time. [1] https://www.pdflib.com/pdf-knowledge-base/pdf-password-secur...

You can encrypt them to completely prevent them from being opened. But cgb223 wasn't talking about that, cgb223 was talking about the ability to open them but not copy text, or not print.
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