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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

#221

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.

Pi is thought to be normal but it hasn't been proven yet, so we can't say that for sure, but it's likely true.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#222

PDF support in Firefox is one of the most important additions in recent years. My gripe with Mozilla was they're pursing all these side projects when they really should be targeting feature parity with Chrome. That's the only way people will ever switch.

I'm curious what you notice is missing in terms of feature parity. I'm mostly a back-end developer (not diving into devtools very often) and switched a year ago. I'm much happier and haven't looked back.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrational does not imply normal. For example, 1.01001000100001... is irrational but it's certainly not normal.

Actually I'd argue the example you provided is normal, as long as you authorise a particular encoding where every number n you're looking for is encoded as a string of n zeros. It's then trivial to see that every number you can think of is encoded in there, and therefore any data, piece of music or movie that ever existed. (I'm not sure we're allowed to fiddle with the encoding, but since we allow ourselves to repres…

Encoding doesn't count. Normality is a very specific mathematical concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

Also, 1.01001000100001... is a good example of a number that is both irrational and transcendental but not normal.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#224
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package, so in a way—yes.

What's the problem with the Poppler-based ones? I've been producing (with LaTeX) and consuming (with Poppler/Okular) PDFs for a decade and never once have I had to worry about anything related to the format (including tracking).

Poppler looks great! But, I _just_ learned about it and I don't think that the majority of population, say, outside of HN knows about its existence, so it's good to have a fairly mainstream alternative available.

OK, Firefox is, sadly, far from being a mainstream browser nowadays, but still I suspect it has a larger user base than Poppler.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#225

A 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…

Okular can "edit" forms. I have been doing this on Linux and Windows for a while. Not the most usable but it works. What I can't do in Okular, I do in Gimp.

I will use Firefox for editable form pdfs but for those that don't have editable forms, I will continue to use Okular/Gimp.

I actually stumbled across the ability to edit forms in Firefox only recently. I was like... What? This is amazing! For some reason the pdf i clicked on opened in Firefox and yeah, surprised.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#226
post #45
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...

You can imagine the pain when you need to reliably detect PDF mime type on web proxy, or something like...

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#227

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, this is a nice feature added to a basically-reasonable implementation of a PDF viewer. I think the objection is that that PDF viewer should be an actual independent application, not baked into a browser that already is too many things to too many people. It's like Chrome including a basic antivirus function ( https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2765944?co=GENIE.Pl... ) - yes it's useful, yes I trust it more…

I really don't see why it should be an independent application. I mean it's not like we expect a PNG viewer or HTML5 video viewer to be a separate application in a browser. Being able to view (and in this case fill/interact with) PDFs is pretty much a basic necessity on the web. Beyond the core HN crowd, almost nobody cares to have a 3rd party application that they have to install to view PDFs in their browser. Having a lightweight and secure PDF viewer that is also not made by some 3rd party company that could be collecting any amount of data on you is a good thing in general.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#228
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly the XML format was just an XML-encoded version of the binary counterpart. Including all or most of the bugs and weird hacks.

with the previous format being essentially a memory dump, i'd say that's progress

That’s correct - I worked with MS team that documented old formats, and they said that sometimes they don’t have people left who knew what specific struct was intended for - although that was mostly for people PowerPoint and Visio, excel and word was better documented

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#229
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least it's probably better than MS-Word's internal format ... (?)

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

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#230
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently made the switch to gnome as the multi-monitor support, fractional scaling and general Wayland support is only excelled by sway. I sorely miss Okular!

Can't you still run KDE apps under Gnome, even with Wayland? I use a few. Some of them look better with the "QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland" environment variable.

Most KDE apps work not just under Gnome, but even under gasp Windows! I think Okular and some others are even in the MS app store.
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