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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

#121

Post by maddyboo »

rvense wrote: post #45
kebman wrote: post #15

I 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.

My favourite PDF fact is that it doesn't have to start at the beginning or end at the end of a file. Any sea of bytes that contains a PDF file is an acceptable PDF file...

Can a PDF file contain a PDF file, and if so can that PDF file contain a PDF file?

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#122

Post by abdullahkhalids »

derefr wrote: post #111
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. A webpage form requires a server to be up and running, which requires an IT person to manage it, separate from the dept making the form. PDF forms can be created by a person given the right tools (I think Word does it) 2. IT person + webserver costs have to included in the budget somewhere. Which can be a big problem. 3. The webpage form can fail, and the support for it has to be provided by the IT dept. If the PD…

Re: all four of your points — see my sibling post. I'm not talking about encapsulated-PostScript "Print and Fill" forms (which do certainly degrade gracefully), or even open-standard PDF "Fill and Print" forms (which degrade gracefully if you don't set them up with a bad default state where there's big "N/A" text over all the disabled fields until you fill in other fields.) Instead, I'm talking about the PDFs you can…

I understand better what you are saying. I don't think I have ever seen any PDF forms that require an internet connection. The Canadian Visa application forms have inbuilt validation code, that checks the form, and once you upload it, I believe data is extracted into a database.

The benefit of these forms is that the validated form that you submit online is actually printable. Which means that what you see on your screen/paper is pixel by pixel identical to what Canada receives, and therefore _legally_, there is no confusion about what was communicated between Canada and the candidate.

Webforms are not as strongly accepted as such by courts. Because they have to be manipulated further before being printed.

I have read a bunch of your replies, and you are thinking of all the technical reasons why webforms are better than PDF (you are right in that), but PDFs have legal and operational and budgetary advantages, that are more relevant to various organizations.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#123

Post by ducktective »

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 don't think that is a proven fact.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#124

Post by kibwen »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #59

Sheesh, what's with the hate for a generally all-round useful feature in an Open source browser? The last thing I want is to have to install 3rd-party software on my machine and have my browser be held hostage to it just to view PDF documents on the web. Being able to fill them in is a very useful feature and the in-browser PDF readers are still way less bloated than most other plugins.

Yes, like it or not PDF is a de facto standard of the web, in the same way that Flash was nearly a de facto standard before the industry-wide decade-long effort to kill it. A browser that doesn't support PDFs is as lacking in the eyes of users as a browser that doesn't support PNGs.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#125

Post by nroets »

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.

Including a PDF that generates the digits of pi

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#126

Post by brendandahl »

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'…

PDF.js dev here. I'm a bit confused on which part of internal API you would like to use? The way I think of it, there are really three API's in pdf.js: 1) Main thread API (api.js) which we base the version off 2) The code that runs in the worker 3) The viewer components (web/*)

Quite awhile ago when we decided what parts of the API to version, we thought more people would want to use #1. Now that the project is mature we could probably expose some more base the version off of that.

As for the "so that it doesn't look like PDF.js", we don't limit the API because of this. That suggestion (which I don't totally agree with) came from what we saw people doing, where they'd copy the entire viewer, when it'd probably be better to just let the user's browser choose how to show the PDF.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#127

Post by btown »

vcxy wrote: post #117
willis77 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Find the earliest valid pdf in consecutive digits of pi"

Imagine if it was a PDF that simply rendered the number 42.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#128

Post by quickthrowman »

Someone wrote: post #87
kebman wrote: post #15

I 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.

OK, they added various ways of data compression, but PDF is, basically, a text-based format. As far as I know, any PDF can be losslessly converted to an equivalent PDF that can be edited in any text editor, even Notepad. And yes, you could fill in the forms there, too (if you were stubborn enough)

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

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#129

Post by cpeterso »

spidersouris wrote: post #11

Search in PDF is broken since this update. I must go through the whole document for Firefox to load it up and being able to search in it. Couldn't find a similar issue on Bugzilla. Anyone having the same problem?

I just tested PDF search (in an IRS PDF in Firefox 81 on Windows) and it works for me.

Do you see the problem in all PDFs? Maybe there is something unique to the PDF you are searching?

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#130

Post by brendandahl »

spidersouris wrote: post #11

Search in PDF is broken since this update. I must go through the whole document for Firefox to load it up and being able to search in it. Couldn't find a similar issue on Bugzilla. Anyone having the same problem?

Please file a bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...
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