Earlier quoted context omitted.
The digits of pi contain every pdf that ever could and ever will exist.
Including a PDF that generates the digits of pi
actually, if you find the citation, let me know, you might be in for an award
Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
311–320 of 384 posts
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yup! Keep running into having no way to fill in Canadian Government forms. It's all XFA.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#313Earlier 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.
Nice
I worked on a Pdf with inbuilt tracking solution that updated the form layout using ActionScript based on the workflow status and the role of the user (ie the line manager had a different group of fields in the form to complete like their signature while viewing what the initial requestor had entered) Lots of callbacks to the server saving in progress data and updating the status of who had the form, who was next based on department and emailing it to that person if it passed validation.
An initial fun discovery was that you could force the form to download and replace itself with the latest version even if they had just opened some old file they had on their pc.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#314Can it handle Cyrillic and Japanese text fields? For example, poppler can't solve this problem for 12 years[1] already. You can use the attached files to the issue for testing. [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/463
It's open source. Don't blame the developers that cannot read Cyrillic or Japanese. Blame those who can read it but don't contribute.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying it's beautiful, but isn't Ms-Word's internal format basically a series of XML files that are zipped up? The old .Doc and .xls files were a bad format, but my understanding is that since Office 2007 the format is generally much better.
Ms office files prior to office 2007 were mostly memory dumps of specific components, wrapped into composite files aka OLE2 storage - their content varied depending on office versions and often locale
Its a wonder alternative editors ever supported the format..
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#316Earlier 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.
Is this correct, mathematically?
I understand the point that PI contains every possible piece of information, theoretically.
However, the chance of finding a given string in PI depends on the string’s length. The longer the string, the more the probability tends to 0.
The paradox therefore is that PI contains every PDF, but you will never find them, so in what sense does it really contain them at all?
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#317A 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…
Yeah, I never understood the PDF hate at all when I only used Macs. They were snappy, had smooth scaling, editing them wasn't too hard, and scrolling was smooth. It was a fine way to read documents or even books on a computer.
Then I had to use Windows. Good god, PDFs are horrible here. No matter what I use, every application is horrible in its own unique ways. Nothing can compare to the default software provided for free with Macs. I'd prefer to manage PDFs on my phone than my work computer.
If Mozilla can help people edit PDFs to any extent, they're doing the world a service.
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#318I 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.…
> In more provincial regions and even just much of Europe lots of forms have to be filled out and printed.
This is changing quickly with the covid pandemic. One of its silver linings is that I can't remember the last time I had to wait in line for one hour only to be told off by some exhausted bureaucrat about my missing grand-parents' birth certificate or whatever the hell they come up with. Take that, bureaucracy!
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#319I 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!
I think one of the biggest pain points that developers hit that hasn't been mentioned here is content extraction.
A lot of the time developers want access to the text inside PDFs. Unlike HTML or formats like MS Word (XML or old binary format) getting "text" isn't really possible.
Most "document" formats have the concept of words or strings: a set of characters separated by whitespace. PDF isn't a "document" format in that sense - it's a page description language. Instead of strings of text you have character glyphs positioned at a particular location.
If you want to "read" the text, you have to work out the orientation (which can change throughout the page - think of table header alignment), and use some kind of heuristic to guess the word spacing based on the font and character spacing.
There's also this whole thing with clipping, where some text can be hidden behind other objects (or off page) so you have to try to deal with that.
There's lots of libraries that try to do this for you, but there are lots because none get it right 100% of the time...
Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms
#320Earlier 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.
GP uses the phrases "losslessly convert to text" and "fill in the forms". I think you've misunderstood them, they're clearly talking about the display text, and not the code that comprises it.