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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

#281

Post by sfink »

andrewzah wrote: post #233
eddiecalzone wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just want support for APIs, mainly. I get websites from time to time that just refuse to load. E.g. * blank pages when trying to load an imgur gallery on v68 (esr). * image uploading not working right on instagram and various other sites, either producing blank images or ones with weird lines. * several teleconferencing / video meeting websites just don't work properly, whether it's not detecting hardware properly,…

Please file bugs for these. Also, to the author of this comment: please file bugs for these. (I work for Mozilla and yet I'm pretty lazy about bothering to file these.)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Web%20Com... if you're on desktop.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#282

Post by mey »

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…

The least problematic options have been Microsoft Edge (already on the system) and Adobe (more problematic).

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#283

Post by mey »

maxerickson wrote: post #212
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…

What comes with Adobe Reader? I have it on my work computer and haven't noticed anything I would rate as particularly obnoxious, but I don't use it much.

If you aren't careful during the download/install process they will attempt to bundle various McAfee "security" products and an Adobe chrome extension into the install. Additionally they have made it less obvious where to download Reader instead of buying Acrobat.

Edit: Example, which you may not see if you aren't on Windows. https://musteat.org/images/hn/abobe_install.png

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#284

Post by mkl »

xfer wrote: post #271
mkl wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP is right. The code that makes up a PDF is text-based. Those images can be encoded in the PDF file using the ASCIIHexDecode filter, i.e. as editable ASCII text code.

Yes just use a hex editor and every data is text-based.

Only the "binary" bits like fonts and bitmap images would need to be hex (and then only so Notepad doesn't mangle them). Everything else in an uncompressed PDF is already text. Go here and download the PDF spec.: https://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html

Look at Chapter 3, Syntax (and the rest of it, really).

I literally have scripts that use bash and sed, or Python, to modify PDFs by editing the text code. Doing it in Notepad is possible but tricky, as there's a table of object byte offsets near the end that it's easy to mess up by inserting a character.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#286

Post by chuinard »

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...

I never understood that Google security blog post on how they could make 2 different PDFs with different content have the same SHA but now that you mention you can stuff bytes in a file unrelated to the PDF, it makes sense...

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#287

Post by shmerl »

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 works for it in KDE on Linux. I wouldn't trade KDE for Windows :)

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#288

Post by brailsafe »

maddyboo wrote: post #121
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...

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

Yes.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#289

Post by fgonzag »

belval wrote: post #107
jahewson wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acrobat can read fantastically corrupt PDF files none of which are covered by the spec. The endless surprises induce a special kind of madness. Streams just suddenly end? That’s ok. Totally corrupt xref tables? Ok. Incorrect image headers? Ok. Unrecognisably mangled Type1 font formats? Fine!

That's great because it creates client expectations regarding what my PDF application should support. Implementing the spec is not good enough, you have to do what PDFium or Adobe do.

On the other hand, if they never supported those broken PDFs to begin with, we wouldn't have them in the wild and wouldn't have to deal with them.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#290

Post by brailsafe »

betatim wrote: post #149
maddyboo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. Because the PDF standard specifies a mechanism that lets you "attach" files to a PDF :)

I worked for PDFTron on their WebViewer product earlier this year, and primarily spent time implementing this feature in JS. Understanding the spec on this was tricky, because standard PDF viewers need to be able to uncompress the stuff you jam in there. It kind of blew my mind that you can literally jam any arbitrary file into a PDF.
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