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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

#341

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

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...

ISO deprecating it won't actually improve things at all, surely? It's Adobe that has the power and created the problem.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#342

Post by roflc0ptic »

mkl wrote: post #268
roflc0ptic wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

More. Go here and download the PDF spec.: https://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html Look at Chapter 3, Syntax. The code is all text based. We are not talking about the visible characters in a PDF viewer, but the code of the PDF file itself.

Oh, true. I misread, and also didn't know that. Thanks for the info!

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#343

Post by exikyut »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #108
burtonator wrote: post #44

I'm the author of Polar ( https://getpolarized.io/ ) that uses PDF.js as its PDF backend. This is a somewhat big update for PDF.js which is kind of cool in that they haven't really been updating it as aggressively as they usually do in the last year or so. It's a bit frustrating to work with though. The entire concept of rendering a PDF via JS is fascinating but actually using the API has been a huge pain for us. We'…

I've been working on an internal tool for my company using the same library. It's saved me a ton of work, but my experience has been similar to yours. I've even had to lock in to a much older version for want of putting a lot more work on my plate since the API seems to have changed a fair bit. (well, between it and JSDOM which I am using to some rendering on the server). And like you I've had to write a bunch of the…

I'm benignly curious how pdfimages explodes in your use case.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#344

Post by vbarrielle »

drdaeman wrote: post #200
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #78

I 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.…

Okular works on Windows. Or, at least, used to be, some years ago.

Tried it a few months ago, it works.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#345

Post by gcarvalho »

drdaeman wrote: post #200
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #78

I 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.…

Okular works on Windows. Or, at least, used to be, some years ago.

It's available on the Store. No need to log in to download it too.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/okular/9n41msq1wnm8?active...

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#346

Post by 52-6F-62 »

exikyut wrote: post #343
52-6F-62 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on an internal tool for my company using the same library. It's saved me a ton of work, but my experience has been similar to yours. I've even had to lock in to a much older version for want of putting a lot more work on my plate since the API seems to have changed a fair bit. (well, between it and JSDOM which I am using to some rendering on the server). And like you I've had to write a bunch of the…

I'm benignly curious how pdfimages explodes in your use case.

Unfortunately, it and Poppler, and Imagemagick, etc were all off the table. I was confined to running everything within a Node instance. Couldn't make calls out to command line tools. I tried probably 20 ways of using Poppler-based libraries to no avail.

It definitely would have been the better performing route, and simpler to implement. As it is, since the app is low traffic for actual processing of the images it doesn't matter too much, thankfully.

This library was helpful: https://github.com/ScientaNL/pdf-extractor

I haven't had time to do it cleanly, but I should contribute back with the types I wrote after cleaning them up...

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#347

Post by gpvos »

nip wrote: post #155
gpvos wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but >98% of the PDFs I use are just for reading and don't contain a fillable form. And implementing a PDF viewer is already a major undertaking; adding the form functionality complicates things even more.

I posted a link (above) to the app I built to solve that problem. The vast majority of form is indeed not « ready » for input, requiring users to go through hoops to fill them. And that work is done again by the next person.

I wasn't referring to any problem. Again, all those PDFs I wrote about are intended for reading only; no filling in, signing or other form of interaction other than reading letters that form words on a page is involved in any way, and that is entirely fine and how it should be, so both the PDF itself and a PDF reader that has no form-filling functionality would be entirely fit for purpose (notice the word "reader").

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#348

Post by boringg »

topspin wrote: post #261
jrochkind1 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, we can't just do that. But it's nice to dream.

Well, yes, we can, but the outcome will be far worse. The naive imagine "something better." The real world will interpret "better" as 27 half baked alternatives, 2 of which will work on something other than Chrome running on Windows.

Agree with this - minus the naive part. I think you can dream and you can have "something better" but you risk all the good work that has been put in already which might put you in a worse spot. If you ran a hypothetical model on what the future outcomes might be the likelihood of something better is probably pretty small. That said, we can always dream.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#349

Post by marvindanig »

cptskippy wrote: post #303
marvindanig wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you envision lawyers putting all their legal contracts into fancy flippy books? Someone will have to solve it for the lawyers in a not so 'fancy consumerish' way. Point is that it is possible to do that, and Firefox shouldn't be solving this problem using an ancient format and a layer of cruft in between.

But we have PDF today and everyone is already using it. What does this bring to the table that's improved over PDF from a user's perspective? You can be a developer who enjoys the smell of your own farts all day long but that doesn't mean anyone else wants to smell them.

Well, if you sit so close to someone's opinions or comments on the Internet, wouldn't you have to smell whatever whether you like it or not? ;-)

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#350

Post by poizan42 »

mtzet wrote: post #83
willis77 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well maybe. We don't know if pi is a normal number.

Actually it only needs to be a disjunctive (or rich) number which is a weaker condition.

We don't know whether pi is that either for any integer base.

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