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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

#31

Post by InitialLastName »

mdiesel wrote: post #25
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?

I use PDF XChange Editor, and convinced my company it was worth it to pay for it (which it is). Aside from editing capabilities and everything else you'd want, it opens and searches large files far quicker than anything else I tried. On mobile, I use MuPDF but its limited on features and I use because it's quick.

I've always been sketched out by PDF XChange Editor (not sure if it's the name, the developer's name, or the model) but it's interesting to hear that it's legit. Will have a look!

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

#32

Post by hollander »

michaelmrose wrote: post #23
marcellus23 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is it actually rotated or does it just remember that that document is supposed to be rotated? In other words if you emailed it to me would it still be rotated when I opened it?

You may need to save it, but you can rotate just one page in Preview and keep the rest in its original position. I also like that you can click the title in Preview, edit it, change the location, without having to close the document.

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

#33

Post by tpmx »

motform wrote: post #28
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.

preview.app has been around since NextSTEP, which used display postscript for its windowing engine. Having a first-class pdf reader falls out pretty naturally.

Sure. Spending money on implementing okayish PDF forms support.. I'm going to out on a limb here and say that it wasn't done out a position of strength.

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

#34

Post by c0nsumer »

I wish the Firefox PDF viewer performed a little better...

Lately as I've been working on mapping projects and want to view large PDFs I've found many which need to be saved and opened in Preview.app instead of the browser.

This is a great example of a map which views horribly in Firefox (try zooming in) but works great in Preview.app: https://www.bia.gov/sites/bia.gov/files/assets/public/webtea...

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

#35

Post by muizelaar »

c0nsumer wrote: post #34

I wish the Firefox PDF viewer performed a little better... Lately as I've been working on mapping projects and want to view large PDFs I've found many which need to be saved and opened in Preview.app instead of the browser. This is a great example of a map which views horribly in Firefox (try zooming in) but works great in Preview.app: https://www.bia.gov/sites/bia.gov/files/assets/public/webtea...

I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1736108 for that case.

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

#36

Post by muizelaar »

zinekeller wrote: post #19
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.)

It doesn't.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Language             Files        Lines        Blank      Comment         Code
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   JavaScript             355       144428        13069        16759       114600
   JSON                    12        24385            2            0        24383
   CSS                     12         3302          407          183         2712
   HTML                    32         1638          176          230         1232
   Markdown                19          733          221            0          512
   TypeScript               1           20            4            2           14
   CoffeeScript             1           15            2            0           13
   YAML                     1            4            0            1            3
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                  433       174525        13881        17175       143469
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

#37

Post by tjoff »

jessaustin wrote: post #4
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.

It would be possible to implement telemetry that would answer these questions in mostly unobjectionable fashion, but without more information one can see how this could be described as "scary". I certainly hope that forms aren't just being sent back home to Mozilla as-is. However, a monthly ping with statistics like "out of between 50 and 200 documents, between 10 and 50 of them used javascript" wouldn't harm anythin…

It would be possible to figure this out without any sort of telemetry at all.

It really feels like a forced way to try and shoe-horn something good to say about telemetry when it is something everyone that deals with PDFs have known since forever.

And if that is the best they have to show for it ...

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

#38

Post by ocdtrekkie »

InitialLastName wrote: post #30
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often do not have a problem with the information telemetry collects: I take issue with the entitlement to it a new breed of awful app developers have. They think they have the right to use my device for information collection without my permission. If Firefox occasionally showed me a report on some metrics it collected and asked me if I was okay sending it to Mozilla, I'd probably be fine with it. However, the choi…

Do they do that? It's been a long time since I installed Firefox, but as far as I can tell there are very visible settings for controlling the telemetry that they collect.

There are settings, however, they are enabled by default to silently send telemetry, and they also implement new ways of collecting telemetry, with new settings to opt out of it, on an "every few months" basis. So it's a constant battle of monitoring what behavior they're up to and turning it off.

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

#39

Post by muizelaar »

alacritas0 wrote: post #20

It's impressive how slowly progress has been made on the firefox pdf viewer. They can't print out pages which aren't blurry from the viewer even though they've had 8 years notice: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=811002

That bug is closed. What PDF and platform do you see blurriness on?

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

#40

Post by kuschku »

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?

I just use KDE Okular on windows, it’s available in the microsoft store.
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