Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

support.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 384 posts

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#251

Post by Semiapies »

boringg wrote: post #170

Can we just step away from PDFs to a better standard? Every time I deal with PDFs or I have to on behalf of my parents it is a true waste of time and resources - there has to be a better way.

At the very least, you need a replacement that's technically better, works well cross-platform, has a layman-acceptable UI, and supports 99.999%+ of all the use cases PDFs currently supports. It also has to convert old PDFs into the new format.

Then, you have to worry about market share and acceptance.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#252

Post by jmiserez »

kibwen wrote: post #124
_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.

If Flash was rendered natively in the browser, sandboxed and across different browsers, and with high enough performance/low enough battery impact, it would have stayed.

There were efforts similar to PDF.js to run Flash content using JS but they were never able to tick all those boxes.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#253

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

cgb223 wrote: post #145
rvense wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

My favorite pdf fact is that the security flags for things like copy protection and passwords are on the viewer to implement so you can just turn them off and all the security is gone

Debian actually goes out of their way to patch those checks out in their PDF-related packages as part of their stance against DRM, like this example with "pdftk":

https://sources.debian.org/patches/pdftk/2.02-4/drm_fix/

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#254

Post by smegger001 »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #172
cgb223 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite pdf fact is that the security flags for things like copy protection and passwords are on the viewer to implement so you can just turn them off and all the security is gone

My somewhat less favorite pdf fact is that if you do that, you are still breaking protection, legally speaking.

So what if you open it in a postscript viewer instead of a PDF viewer? Because they are compatible formats except for some edge cases like security flags.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#255

Post by marvindanig »

yzmtf2008 wrote: post #84
marvindanig wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but does Firefox need to solve the use-case of a court system? Also, tangentially the solution to guarantee "tamperproof" archiving is in cryptography and that's not a feature of PDF.

No, Firefox doesn’t need to support the use case of a court system. That’s not what GP is saying. All we’re establishing here is that PDF is a useful format, and Firefox is supporting it. Also, cryptographic signatures do happen to be a feature of PDF.

Now that I read my comment I see the issue with it.

What I meant to say is that Firefox should focus on implementing cryptographic signing over HTML then. And not a PDF viewer on the web--in that, enabling cryptographic signatures isn't tied to the format PDF per se.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#256

Post by MayeulC »

mickotron wrote: post #225
dgellow wrote: post #168

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…

And IIRC it's available on the windows store. It probably has msi as well.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#257

Post by wffurr »

agumonkey wrote: post #235
rvense wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I can never find the PDF hack talk where author explains all 100 ways to embed things in pdf or pdf into things

It's hidden in a PDF in the digits of Pi.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#258

Post by smegger001 »

jhoechtl wrote: post #140
DavidPeiffer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair the old doc format was conceived in DOS era and memory efficiency was a primer back in the days.

and if they hadn't waited so long to update to a sane file format no one would complain but they waited until 2007 to fix the format long after the dos era memory excuse had long ceased to be an issue. even then they only did it to allow them to shoe horn their format in as the iso standard after one was already selected bribing there way through the process.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#259

Post by bscphil »

x3c wrote: post #183
andreareina wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Technically, 1.01001000100001... can be normal depending on what ... stands for. :)

Well, obviously. But presumably the ... is meant to imply that this is the summation of 1/(10^(x(x+3)/2)).

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#260

Post by phpdave11 »

recursive wrote: post #237
phpdave11 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not that difficult if you read and understand the PDF specification. As a learning exercise, I created a simple PDF generator library that creates ASCII PDF documents (you can open them in Notepad) and includes comments about what each drawing instruction does. https://github.com/phpdave11/davepdf

I'm sure generating PDFs is much easier than reading them, such that "it just works" with any kind of PDF.

Reading them is also easy. I wrote a library that reads PDFs and imports page(s) from an existing PDF into a new PDF as a Form XObject.

https://github.com/phpdave11/gofpdi

Post reply on HN