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Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer

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Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer

#11

Post by zinekeller »

tpmx wrote: post #9
InitialLastName wrote: post #7

Why is it that, a ~decade since MacOS started including forms and markups in their default PDF app (Preview) there still isn't a sane PDF editor for Windows? Chrome and Firefox's PDF viewers don't have editing, Edge has editing and forms but bonkers window management (sometimes PDFs open with Edge but not in an Edge window). Adobe Reader DC still tries to ship with malware, and is license-restricted. What gives?

Apple did it because they were the underdog 15-20 years ago. Microsoft doesn't give a shit. There's no realistic market opportunity for a small third party to get a sizeable amount of revenue either, with Adobe looming. I kinda miss the early 90s when we actually had competing software "houses" with some financial muscle.

Wrong answer, at least for a time. Microsoft was actually sued by Adobe over the PDF implementation with Office 2007 (before it was standardised in ISO, that was circa 2008-9 if I remember correctly). That's also the reason that XPS (the weird Microsoft format, not Dell laptops) exists.

Nowadays though, I don't really know since Microsoft has successfully overturned that case (probably because of Adobe being Adobe?).

Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer

#12

Post by tpmx »

zinekeller wrote: post #11
tpmx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple did it because they were the underdog 15-20 years ago. Microsoft doesn't give a shit. There's no realistic market opportunity for a small third party to get a sizeable amount of revenue either, with Adobe looming. I kinda miss the early 90s when we actually had competing software "houses" with some financial muscle.

Wrong answer, at least for a time. Microsoft was actually sued by Adobe over the PDF implementation with Office 2007 (before it was standardised in ISO, that was circa 2008-9 if I remember correctly). That's also the reason that XPS (the weird Microsoft format, not Dell laptops) exists. Nowadays though, I don't really know since Microsoft has successfully overturned that case (probably because of Adobe being Adobe?).

So, not really the wrong answer for the past 12 years or so, then.

Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer

#13

Post by zinekeller »

InitialLastName wrote: post #10
gsliepen wrote: post #2

> Thanks to our Telemetry, we discovered that many forms contain and use embedded JavaScript code (yes, that’s a thing!). There are two disturbing things in that sentence. At least the JavaScript I can see a reason for, it can check whether your input is correct and maybe autofill or things like that, and should of course be sandboxed. The telemetry part is more scary.

> The telemetry part is more scary. There's a nice big section in the Firefox settings called "Firefox Data Collection and Use" that has some fairly fine-grained options for what data you feed back to Firefox. I have all of mine unchecked, but I could imagine that if I were more community-minded, or if I were interested in actively contributing to FF's development day-to-day (for example running on nightly builds) I…

Also, unless you dismiss it, there's a clear button to read to read their privacy policy and set telemetry (unless you're using the nightly-weekly builds, in this case they state in no ambiguous terms that you cannot disable it).

Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer

#16

Post by jfk13 »

fzzzy wrote: post #15

Remember when Mozilla management promised that they were going to kill pdf.js (why?) and replace it with the chrome pdf viewer, then wasted a few years not pulling it off? Good times.

Sometimes plans don't work out (and/or circumstances change), and changing them is the sensible thing to do.

(I don't know details of this specific case, and whether/why the plans and decisions made sense at any given time.)

Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer

#17

Post by marcellus23 »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #5

To this day, I do not understand why it is practically impossible to simply rotate a PDF and save it in its rotated form without downloading some additional PDF application. Edit: On Windows. I envy Preview in MacOS

Might want to specify the platform. on macOS that's like 2 clicks in Preview.app.

Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer

#18

Post by rudian »

arbitrage wrote: post #6
gsliepen wrote: post #2

> Thanks to our Telemetry, we discovered that many forms contain and use embedded JavaScript code (yes, that’s a thing!). There are two disturbing things in that sentence. At least the JavaScript I can see a reason for, it can check whether your input is correct and maybe autofill or things like that, and should of course be sandboxed. The telemetry part is more scary.

What I find disturbing is that you are complaining about the included javascript in forms at this late a date. Where have you been for like the last fifteen years?

Fifteen years is a long time. I’m sure some HN users weren’t even born yet.

Not everyone needs to care about everything all the time. I would complain about JS in PDF too, but I don’t have a voice anyway.

Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer

#19

Post by zinekeller »

frankjr wrote: post #14

I'm glad PDF.js' development continues. I completely missed that they have abandoned the plan to move to PDFium ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project ).

Mozilla developers at the time actually have other plans with the Pepper plugin support: Adobe Flash (since that Chrome's Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) is actually miles better and secure than the Netscape [-era - ed.] Plugin API or NPAPI).

They abandoned Mortar when Adobe have announced that it will retire Flash.

(Also, PDF.js is now a misnomer: it now mainly uses WebAssembly.)

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