5 ms·

As much as many of us lament the state of much of today's software, if you think of products from a certain era - IE6, Flash, Java web applets - they all had a

As much as many of us lament the state of much of today's software, if you think of products from a certain era - IE6, Flash, Java web applets - they all had a commonality in their code quality. These are mostly a non-issue these days, but it's not because they suddenly stopped having bugs and still get active use. I remember rolling out Adobe Reader in those days and as a product, I don't believe its core has changed much. They've certainly managed to bolt on a whole lot of new features, but that can only make the position worse. As much as this sounds like a call to kill Adobe, something needs to happen before that's feasible. For the average enterprise, Adobe Reader is far more ingrained than these products were. Case in point, in organisation I asked the question of whether Chrome's PDF viewer would cut it for them. One large department then ordered Adobe Professional for every user. They told me they didn't need it, they just knew I wouldn't propose removing a product they'd actually paid for. Adobe Reader needs its HTML5 moment - an alternative that's not just "good enough for most people", but one that's actually better.

oblio 8y ago
Who's going to go into an entrenched, mature market? The money's going to the easy places, new markets.
wongarsu 8y ago
To be fair, in my experience Chrome's and Firefox's PDF viewers don't cut it. They are good for a quick preview, but especially when printing they occasionally render things slightly wrong, which is unacceptable for a file format whose entire point is to look the same everywhere. Also forms. That doesn't mean that there aren't any alternatives. Foxit for example is pretty good. But in-browser alternatives just aren't there yet
- throwaway12iii 8y ago
  pdf.js has had 26 pull requests merged in the last month. 5,622 additions and 6,991 deletions. That's just in the project directly, not in the dependencies. Since it's such a quickly evolving project, I wondered where form support is up to. https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/7613 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/7613 Form support is not complete. Seems like it required quite a rewrite to get the foundation in a good place to finish it off. Are there rendering bugs? Yes. See plenty here: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues Of course, Acrobat also has PDF rendering bugs, and other various bugs apart from the security issues mentioned (their JavaScript implementation for example). As for printing... browsers aren't even good at printing HTML. The best browser for printing is based on the old Opera software(PrinceXML), and Safari is probably second. Remember the Apple display system used to be based on PDF rendering... and they do a lot with CUPS and graphic designers. However, printing PDFs on many browsers can go directly to the printer or the OS (which mostly all support rendering PDFs directly now).
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > Remember the Apple display system used to be based on PDF rendering Does Quartz not still try to match PDF in the way its render structure is composed internally?
  - srcmap 8y ago
    Is there a AFL type CI work flow for fuzzing pdf.js? google it seems only return how to fuzz js engine kind of links. Love to see write up of how to fuzz a JS application by doing AFL type mutations on the server return data, etc.
- singhrac 8y ago
  Chromium uses Pdfium, which is based on the Foxit code base, actually, since they bought some pieces of it: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/blog/the-interesting-history-and-fascinating-future-of-pdf-software/ https://www.foxitsoftware.com/blog/the-interesting-history-a.... Actually I've never had rendering bugs with Chrome, though it's certainly happened with Firefox.
  - Already__Taken 8y ago
    We don't find bugs with it it's just limited. Can't highlight, can't rotate individual pages, can't save rotated pages (you have to "print" it to "Save as pdf" again, awful ux)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- shawnz 8y ago
  A counterpoint: for a while I was working at my uni's help desk, and we would ask all clients to print PDFs from Chrome as a matter of course just because it was so much more reliable at producing the correct output on paper, even when compared to Adobe Reader.
- jandrese 8y ago
  I've never noticed rendering errors, but my problem with the browser built-in PDF viewers is that they can't handle big complex PDFs, especially on older machines. They'll gobble up 4GB of RAM like it's nothing and start swapping on PDFs that Acroread or xpdf display in less than a second.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  Dumb question: Why can't we just burn PNGs[0] or lossless JPEGs and just use OCR / other simple machine learning for text selection? Like, I get that there are some unfortunate souls out there that need to edit CAD documents in their PDF but for 99.999% of people PDFs do one thing that websites do not: Print reliably well given a page format like A4. I shouldn't have to wince ever time I open a PDF. They're so insecure that a no-click RCE only fetches $10k. [0] Or ideally SVG, but there are some problems with fonts and licensing that I'm struggling to remember at the moment.
  - wbl 8y ago
    Accessibility, plus print is at ridiculous DPI compared to screen. To achieve compression you want to use the fact that there is a font being repeated across the page. OCR just isn't good enough.
    - 3pt14159 8y ago
      Are you telling me that our compression algorithms can't compress a page of "e"s tighter than a page of random Chinese characters? Accessibility is a fair point, but for print-to-file applications we're surely at the point where OCR can at least get the text to a readable format, no?
  - da_chicken 8y ago
    Because OCR is expensive (to write as software and to process for the end user) and very error prone, especially if your text is anything other than a 12 point black font in on a white background with no formatting (italics, underlines, etc.). If my document's information is valuable, I'm not going to be willing to rely on the quality of my recipient's OCR software to get a digitally readable copy of my work. I mean, at the very least, what if they're blind? The general hatred for PDFs in the tech community is almost completely rooted in Adobe's initial decision to make PDF editing and creation cost $500. You have access to a document that want to make changes to, but you can't because it's a PDF and don't have access to the document source because the owner/publisher didn't provide that. It's a PDF because PDFs make documents that look the same everywhere, even when printed, which is and will remain critical to the purpose of publishing documents. Well, images don't solve this problem, either, because you still can't edit text in an image, and now you lose the ability to be sure about how they'll print (margins, scaling, etc.). Furthermore, images, even compressed, are significantly larger than a well made PDF. For example, I've got a 6,700 page document of special ed student progress reports that include detailed, full-color charts and graphs of student progress with respect to goals. It's 60 MB. 8.5 KiB per page. Then again, I imagine it won't be long before someone mentions LaTeX as a viable alternative, even though the one thing LaTeX isn't is portable. But LaTeX is primarily popular in the tech community because it lets programmers pretend to write code while they're actually writing documentation. Nowhere else will you find people telling you to use a set of programs that require a build environment when someone asks about the best home office application to use. (Yes, I know that LaTeX is a typesetting language. My cynicism is that some tech people tell others to use LaTeX when they're asked what word processor someone should use.) Edit: Clarified second paragraph.
executesorder66 8y ago
> One large department then ordered Adobe Professional for every user. They told me they didn't need it, they just knew I wouldn't propose removing a product they'd actually paid for. Why would they do that though?
- Spivak 8y ago
  I'm assuming that they didn't actually need any of the professional features, they just saw it as a way to avoid having Adobe Reader/Acrobat removed from systems in favor of something they like less but admins like more.
  - technion 8y ago
    Assumption is correct.
airstrike 8y ago
My organization uses Adobe extensively and we could never make do with the Chrome viewer. When you're opening 200-page documents with links, highlighted text and bookmarks, a browser plugin just won't be fast and responsive enough. I would imagine this is the case in most large organizations.

oblio 8y ago

Who's going to go into an entrenched, mature market? The money's going to the easy places, new markets.

wongarsu 8y ago

To be fair, in my experience Chrome's and Firefox's PDF viewers don't cut it. They are good for a quick preview, but especially when printing they occasionally render things slightly wrong, which is unacceptable for a file format whose entire point is to look the same everywhere. Also forms. That doesn't mean that there aren't any alternatives. Foxit for example is pretty good. But in-browser alternatives just aren't there yet

throwaway12iii 8y ago
pdf.js has had 26 pull requests merged in the last month. 5,622 additions and 6,991 deletions. That's just in the project directly, not in the dependencies. Since it's such a quickly evolving project, I wondered where form support is up to. https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/7613 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/7613 Form support is not complete. Seems like it required quite a rewrite to get the foundation in a good place to finish it off. Are there rendering bugs? Yes. See plenty here: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues Of course, Acrobat also has PDF rendering bugs, and other various bugs apart from the security issues mentioned (their JavaScript implementation for example). As for printing... browsers aren't even good at printing HTML. The best browser for printing is based on the old Opera software(PrinceXML), and Safari is probably second. Remember the Apple display system used to be based on PDF rendering... and they do a lot with CUPS and graphic designers. However, printing PDFs on many browsers can go directly to the printer or the OS (which mostly all support rendering PDFs directly now).
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > Remember the Apple display system used to be based on PDF rendering Does Quartz not still try to match PDF in the way its render structure is composed internally?
- srcmap 8y ago
  Is there a AFL type CI work flow for fuzzing pdf.js? google it seems only return how to fuzz js engine kind of links. Love to see write up of how to fuzz a JS application by doing AFL type mutations on the server return data, etc.
singhrac 8y ago
Chromium uses Pdfium, which is based on the Foxit code base, actually, since they bought some pieces of it: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/blog/the-interesting-history-and-fascinating-future-of-pdf-software/ https://www.foxitsoftware.com/blog/the-interesting-history-a.... Actually I've never had rendering bugs with Chrome, though it's certainly happened with Firefox.
- Already__Taken 8y ago
  We don't find bugs with it it's just limited. Can't highlight, can't rotate individual pages, can't save rotated pages (you have to "print" it to "Save as pdf" again, awful ux)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
shawnz 8y ago
A counterpoint: for a while I was working at my uni's help desk, and we would ask all clients to print PDFs from Chrome as a matter of course just because it was so much more reliable at producing the correct output on paper, even when compared to Adobe Reader.
jandrese 8y ago
I've never noticed rendering errors, but my problem with the browser built-in PDF viewers is that they can't handle big complex PDFs, especially on older machines. They'll gobble up 4GB of RAM like it's nothing and start swapping on PDFs that Acroread or xpdf display in less than a second.
3pt14159 8y ago
Dumb question: Why can't we just burn PNGs[0] or lossless JPEGs and just use OCR / other simple machine learning for text selection? Like, I get that there are some unfortunate souls out there that need to edit CAD documents in their PDF but for 99.999% of people PDFs do one thing that websites do not: Print reliably well given a page format like A4. I shouldn't have to wince ever time I open a PDF. They're so insecure that a no-click RCE only fetches $10k. [0] Or ideally SVG, but there are some problems with fonts and licensing that I'm struggling to remember at the moment.
- wbl 8y ago
  Accessibility, plus print is at ridiculous DPI compared to screen. To achieve compression you want to use the fact that there is a font being repeated across the page. OCR just isn't good enough.
  - 3pt14159 8y ago
    Are you telling me that our compression algorithms can't compress a page of "e"s tighter than a page of random Chinese characters? Accessibility is a fair point, but for print-to-file applications we're surely at the point where OCR can at least get the text to a readable format, no?
- da_chicken 8y ago
  Because OCR is expensive (to write as software and to process for the end user) and very error prone, especially if your text is anything other than a 12 point black font in on a white background with no formatting (italics, underlines, etc.). If my document's information is valuable, I'm not going to be willing to rely on the quality of my recipient's OCR software to get a digitally readable copy of my work. I mean, at the very least, what if they're blind? The general hatred for PDFs in the tech community is almost completely rooted in Adobe's initial decision to make PDF editing and creation cost $500. You have access to a document that want to make changes to, but you can't because it's a PDF and don't have access to the document source because the owner/publisher didn't provide that. It's a PDF because PDFs make documents that look the same everywhere, even when printed, which is and will remain critical to the purpose of publishing documents. Well, images don't solve this problem, either, because you still can't edit text in an image, and now you lose the ability to be sure about how they'll print (margins, scaling, etc.). Furthermore, images, even compressed, are significantly larger than a well made PDF. For example, I've got a 6,700 page document of special ed student progress reports that include detailed, full-color charts and graphs of student progress with respect to goals. It's 60 MB. 8.5 KiB per page. Then again, I imagine it won't be long before someone mentions LaTeX as a viable alternative, even though the one thing LaTeX isn't is portable. But LaTeX is primarily popular in the tech community because it lets programmers pretend to write code while they're actually writing documentation. Nowhere else will you find people telling you to use a set of programs that require a build environment when someone asks about the best home office application to use. (Yes, I know that LaTeX is a typesetting language. My cynicism is that some tech people tell others to use LaTeX when they're asked what word processor someone should use.) Edit: Clarified second paragraph.

executesorder66 8y ago

> One large department then ordered Adobe Professional for every user. They told me they didn't need it, they just knew I wouldn't propose removing a product they'd actually paid for. Why would they do that though?

Spivak 8y ago
I'm assuming that they didn't actually need any of the professional features, they just saw it as a way to avoid having Adobe Reader/Acrobat removed from systems in favor of something they like less but admins like more.
- technion 8y ago
  Assumption is correct.

airstrike 8y ago

My organization uses Adobe extensively and we could never make do with the Chrome viewer. When you're opening 200-page documents with links, highlighted text and bookmarks, a browser plugin just won't be fast and responsive enough. I would imagine this is the case in most large organizations.