27 ms·

Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

1093 points by muxator 6y ago

PaulHoule 6y ago
I find the built-in PDF reader in Firefox to be bloat. It's OK, it works 95% of the time, but really I want to use a native PDF viewer. Is there a version of Firefox that removes this bloat? Given that Mozilla is very resource constrained, why are they working on features that aren't necessary?
- danso 6y ago
  A lot of everyday users likely benefit from being able to fill out PDFs in the browser.
- snovv_crash 6y ago
  I find it extremely convenient. Also I know a lot of security issues in PDF viewers are effectively solved by running it in the browser's JS sandbox.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    You could also disable Firefox's built-in PDF viewer and instead use an external PDF viewer that doesn't even support Javascript.
    - detaro 6y ago
      You misunderstand the argument the parent comment makes. It's not about Javscript in PDFs.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Not all PDF vulnerabilities involve JS though.
    - snovv_crash 6y ago
      Native PDF clients have had lots of security holes. In this case having the client written in JS means we can repurpose the battle hardened JS sandbox to also contain PDF exploits.
  - zelly 6y ago
    Firefox's sandboxing incomplete or nonexistent (e.g. GPU process is not sandboxed on Linux).
- Keycap 6y ago
  I hope no one is listing to you. I don't want to start explaining to my mother, over the phone, how to install and use the pdf viewer anymore :|
- anonymousab 6y ago
  And here I found it much less bloated than the other free desktop PDF viewers. I think Mozilla's line of thought here is that PDF documents are widespread in the web, to the point where they are a de facto web document type. So it makes sense for a web browser to support them rather than calling out to a user's desktop program (though I assume you can configure it to do so instead). There's probably a bit of "our competitors do it, so we have to too" in there as well.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Given that Chrome/Edge also just added the feature, I would point out: All web browsers are using the same library for PDF handling, a feature in pdf.js ends up benefiting a lot of people. And the reasons for not requiring an outside PDF reader are major: It's yet another likely-to-have-vulnerabilities program people need to install, then update. In most cases, avoiding Adobe programs on your PC is a good way to avoid a lot of vulnerabilities.
  - oefrha 6y ago
    > All web browsers are using the same library for PDF handling Chrome/Chromium uses PDFium, not PDF.js, so no. Not sure about Edge. PDFium has been able to fill out forms for a long time. What’s new for Chrome is the ability to save edited PDF (as fillable).
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      If Chrome doesn't use pdf.js, then neither would Edge, which is a Chrome fork. My original comment may have been mistaken.
      - oefrha 6y ago
        A Chromium fork could replace certain components if they so choose. The PDF rendering component would be one of the easier ones to replace. However, I was able to confirm that Edge uses extension ID mhjfbmdgcfjbbpaeojofohoefgiehjai to render PDF internally[1], same as Chrome, so indeed it's using PDFium. [1] The rendered PDF element would look like <embed id="plugin" type="application/x-google-chrome-pdf" src="..." stream-url="chrome-extension://mhjfbmdgcfjbbpaeojofohoefgiehjai/..." headers="..." ...> And here's the extension's manifest in Chromium source, where you can find the extension ID: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2baa2b094cdd60e980c1e32c2535b57b700e337f/chrome/browser/resources/pdf/manifest.json https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2baa2b094cdd60e980...
- derefr 6y ago
  I like that single-page PDFs stay in the browser. I don’t want to keep them; I just want to see them. Like any other web-page. I want to be able to hit back, or close the tab, and continue on with my day. And I also like that I can preview long-form PDFs in the browser, before choosing whether to save them and read them “for real.” Imagine if every time you opened a direct-linked JPEG image in your browser, it treated it as an attachment, downloading it and opening it in your external image-previewer app, rather than rendering it as a synthesized HTML DOM wrapper around the image. Wouldn’t you be annoyed by how cluttered your Downloads directory would get with random files you never actually wanted to save?
- cptskippy 6y ago
  Given the amount of PDF exploits over the years and the habit of browsers to automatically invoke your PDF viewer of choice either as a plug-in or call out, they're an easy target. Having a sandboxed PDF viewer that works 95% of the time is great. For those 5% circumstances where I am actively trying to view a PDF and it won't work in browser, I'll gladly go through the minimal effort to open it in an external viewer.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  It was once an add-on, and it was once disableable. It may still be disableable, but I'm sure there's some strange procedure you have to go through to do it.
nvr219 6y ago
FINALLY! Now I can finally uninstall Chrome. Of course, I do wish Sumatra supported filling forms. Then I could uninstall Firefox too! ;-)
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Okular works quite well for filling forms in my experience :)
Causality1 6y ago
Is there something hard about fillable forms on PDF? Why have a PDF viewer at all if it couldn't fill out a form?
- foxdev 6y ago
  While PDF is an open format on paper, in practice it's as proprietary as any ancient format. Supporting it in full is not trivial.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    The real problem here is that, 20+ years on, printing to PDF is still a totally natural and easy-to-understand metaphor for a normal office desktop user; but producing HTML for the browser is still impossible for them. If we simply had print-to-HTML functionality which resulted in a document identical to what you view onscreen while editing, PDF could die the death it deserves. But HTML+CSS somehow manages to suck just as much for common usage, so it persists.
    - foxdev 6y ago
      I wish epub would catch on for more than books. An epub is just HTML and CSS in a zip file, and a large part of the world population has a device than can load it and present it cleanly.
- derefr 6y ago
  > Is there something hard about fillable forms on PDF? In the sense of a “form” just being lines on paper that you can arbitrarily add some text to — no, that’s easy. Likewise, in the sense of a “form” being some defined input regions that accept your keystrokes and turn them into new text DOM nodes in the PDF itself — easy enough. Though, unlike HTML, there’s no concept of an <input> tag that just has the semantics of accepting keystrokes and turning them into (persisted) input; instead, this all has to be done through scripting [i.e. writing event-handlers, or having some PDF authoring software generate them]; and there are several incompatible scripting languages for PDF that get used, some of which are proprietary with no open specification. But, doing form validation? Or, worse yet, making one of those fancy PDF forms that auto-calculates fields like an Excel spreadsheet? Now you’re getting into the hairy stuff, because IIRC none of the open-standard PDF scripting systems provide these sorts of mechanisms, so these are inherently proprietary things. And when I say “proprietary”, I mean “like old versions of Word or Photoshop, where each version emitted its own in-memory data-structures to disk without formal serialization; and it was the job of authors of future versions to write importers to deserialize whatever format resulted.”
voldacar 6y ago
Truly revolutionary tech
- rpastuszak 6y ago
  Well, it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package, so in a way—yes.
  - inetknght 6y ago
    > it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package Uh, what? Firefox supports javascript. PDFs support javascript. Javascript empowers tracking.
    - Hamuko 6y ago
      Firefox PDF support is actually Javascript. https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js
    - MCOfficer 6y ago
      following that logic - every browser that supports cookies comes with a tracking package - electron comes with a tracking package - every language interpreter, runtime or compiler is a tracking package. - your OS can run tracking software, thus coming with a tracking package. - Anyone carrying their phone comes with a tracking package Hang on, did you just post something on the internet? Your HN account comes with a tracking package!
  - gspr 6y ago
    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).
    - rpastuszak 6y ago
      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.
spidersouris 6y ago
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?
- cpeterso 6y ago
  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?
- brendandahl 6y ago
  Please file a bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&component=PDF%20Viewer https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...
  - mattashii 6y ago
    I've seen the same happen, so I've filed a bug with my reproduction: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1666575 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1666575
steviedotboston 6y ago
Chrome has had this forever, right?
kebman 6y ago
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.
- belval 6y ago
  As someone still working with PDF processing, I can confirm that it doesn't get easier.
- divbzero 6y ago
  I had to handle action buttons for a PDF once. I swam out from America a long long ways before turning back. Might have spotted you middle of the ocean.
  - meshaneian 6y ago
    Legit username warns of one PDF peril.
- rvense 6y ago
  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...
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    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?
    - willis77 6y ago
      The digits of pi contain every pdf that ever could and ever will exist.
paulpauper 6y ago
I wold like to see a version that allows forms to be signed
- speedmagnet 6y ago
  Microsoft Edge allows you to draw on PDFs and save them easily. I use it for signing all the time.
  - anaganisk 6y ago
    I think he meant digital signature
    - nip 6y ago
      In case he meant regular (drawn) signature, it can be done via Preview on Mac. For a local web use, I built for myself https://formulairemagique.fr https://formulairemagique.fr for this very reason
      - lostlogin 6y ago
        Preview.app is just so good. It’s my favourite default Mac app by miles. It and terminal.app have survived the thing Apple does where they update applications and remove all the application’s power to achieve anything.
      - tendersej 6y ago
        good job on the simple UI! I think it will prove useful next time I have a form to fill.
  - shoguning 6y ago
    I was pleasantly surprised by this recently. Just worked using my touchscreen laptop. So rare on Windows.
marvindanig 6y ago
Why is Firefox spending all their money and goodwill on a piece of technology that should be done away with? PDF is a dork. It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages. Somewhere in the comments below, it is mentioned that supporting PDFs is a non-trivial piece of technology. May be! Even steam engines have non-trivial technology under the hood.
- beervirus 6y ago
  There are lots of use cases for PDF where a web page is totally unsuitable.
  - marvindanig 6y ago
    As someone working on formats, I disagree with your generalization. But let's get into specifics. List the things about PDF that you believe can't be done with web pages?
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      It's easy to dismiss things in their entirety and then require someone else to "prove you wrong". Why don't you prove you're right instead? Why don't you list all of things that PDFs can do that can also be done with web pages?
      - marvindanig 6y ago
        Sure, here's my list: everything + more. There's nothing a PDF can do that a webpage can't. In fact there are a hundred of things that a webpage can do, but a PDF can't. Including, form fields, input fields and seamless form submissions. Webpages can also do this: https://bubblin.io/cover/official-handbook-by-marvin-danig#frontmatter https://bubblin.io/cover/official-handbook-by-marvin-danig#f... Disclosure: It's my work.
        cptskippy 6y ago
getpost 6y ago
“After entering data into these fields you can download the file to have the filled out version saved to your computer.” What’s the use case? Printing out filled-in forms? But otherwise, who would want the PDF in electronic format? It doesn’t seem like a practical way for users to submit data.
- detaro 6y ago
  Printing is one use case. Also plenty places that want filled out forms uploaded, e-mailed, ... + it allows you to keep a copy with what you entered.
  - getpost 6y ago
    That's my point. Other than printing a nice looking form (which includes faxing), the content of the field data is hard to reuse. Searching PDF content on your own hard drive is problematic. Are there utilities that extract PDF field data and submit it to a database? I'd be grateful to see examples. What about field validation? The PDF may have some minor validation, but that's no substitute for the validation done in a DBMS. If you want users to be able to save a nice looking form, you'd still want the data entered online directly into a DBMS. I'd offer a "download PDF of your input" as an option, for example.
    - toyg 6y ago
      > the content of the field data is hard to reuse. A lot of people don't care, because they come from forms in cartaceous - where they have to manually retype everything anyway. For many, their "DBMS" will be an Excel sheet with a dozen rows. The more advanced types likely have some Adobe software that does all the magic. Fillable PDF forms are really seen as a courtesy to users more than anything particularly useful to the emitter.
    - detaro 6y ago
      Sure, its a structured format, so you totally can extract the individual fields. AFAIK Adobe sells a server product that does that, but I'm sure there's competitors and I have seen the underlying parsing in feature in PDF libraries before. That said, plenty of users of PDFs have a very paper-based/manual workflow still, and not the motivation and expertise to run and update an online form thing. Or they need to have the ability to handle odd inputs anyways, because paper forms have even worse input validation. And from a browser/user perspective, the feature here is useful because people expect me to handle PDFs and do not provide nice web forms. They might have terrible reasons for doing so, but I still need to live with that.
elric 6y ago
That built in PDF viewer is another feature that could have been an addon. It's bloat which increases the browser's attack surface. It's completely unneeded given that just about every OS ships with some kind of PDF reader out of the box.
- axelf4 6y ago
  > It's bloat which increases the browser's attack surface. AFAICT PDF.js is just another JavaScript application and thus as sandboxed as any other website.
  - est31 6y ago
    It's a js application and thus less exploitable than your average C application with tons of unsound code, but IIRC it belongs to the class of "privileged js" layer that Firefox has, so has special rights that usual website js doesn't have.
- morpheuskafka 6y ago
  The built-in PDF reader on Windows is literally to open the PDF in Edge.. so not very good UX for Firefox and also a good argument that browsers are expected to have PDF readers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- toyg 6y ago
  Thank Google - Chrome was the first browser to ship with a pdf reader, and people loved it. Now it's just expected that any browser should have a workable PDF reader built-in.
- sp332 6y ago
  The alternative was installing an Adobe plugin with no sandbox, so it made sense at the time.
- godshatter 6y ago
  I would like to see Mozilla modularize Firefox more. Browsers are such huge beasts that contain everything imaginable plus the kitchen sink these days. It would be nice for these kinds of features to be add-ons that can be disabled or deleted if their functionality is not needed or desired, freeing resources for other use. They can be part of the initial install so that Mozilla can provide the browser as they envision it, but be able to be removed for those who have other ideas of what their browser should consist of. I don't know how technically feasible that is with their code, but it makes sense to me from a developer standpoint.
burtonator 6y ago
I'm the author of Polar (https://getpolarized.io/ 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've had to fork it internally and work on typescript bindings and other features to get it to work. They seem to have a silly policy of only allow developers to use a subset of the API not the whole API itself so that it doesn't look like PDF.js (which I don't understand). A lot of the functionality just isn't available otherwise.
- 0x6A75616E 6y ago
  Hey! Polarized looks pretty cool. Question, has this feature (forms) been merged into the public pdf.js master yet?
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  I've been working on an internal tool for my company using the same library. It's saved me a ton of work, but my experience has been similar to yours. I've even had to lock in to a much older version for want of putting a lot more work on my plate since the API seems to have changed a fair bit. (well, between it and JSDOM which I am using to some rendering on the server). And like you I've had to write a bunch of the bindings/definitions myself or just reduce them to nil (declare module "yadda/yadday/thing" as any)—which is thankfully permissible since it just needs to be built once and run "forever" with near-zero need for feature additions, etc. All to extract images in a routine fashion. Just the same, I'm still immensely thankful they've published the library as OSS.
  - exikyut 6y ago
    I'm benignly curious how pdfimages explodes in your use case.
    - 52-6F-62 6y ago
_coveredInBees 6y ago
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.
- kibwen 6y ago
  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.
  - Eduard 6y ago
    I don't agree. PDF is fine to be some binary blob to download just as most other binary blob formats are. Would you expect to have .exe files being directly interpreted by a browser?
    - jiveturkey 6y ago
      > Would you expect to have .exe files being directly interpreted by a browser? no, i wouldn't. and yet here we are: wasm.
  - jmiserez 6y ago
    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.
    - davidu 6y ago
      https://beta.rive.app/ https://beta.rive.app/ (OSS runtime, xplatform, native rendering)
bawolff 6y ago
Finally. Its a nightmere trying to fill out a pdf form on linux.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I very rarely have any issues using evince. What PDF viewer are you using?
- franga2000 6y ago
  Okular can handle basically everything for me, except for those Adobe-proprietary ones that require JS and all kinds of other dumb features that only Acrobat supports.
  - jhoechtl 6y ago
    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!
    - mgbmtl 6y ago
      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.
      - formerly_proven 6y ago
        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.
    - ReverseCold 6y ago
      Okular should work fine on GNOME, but you might need extra disk space for all the KDE dependencies.
      - 6y ago
austincheney 6y ago
Does this support digital signatures via signing certificate?
blackbrokkoli 6y ago
I have a feeling this thread has a strong bias from highly automated valley life. In more provincial regions and even just much of Europe lots of forms have to be filled out and printed. It is not something you have to everyday or something, but the existing solutions suck massively. You either have to use Adobe, which requires Windows (or Mac, I suppose) and your firstborn or use some massively shady online service. So personally, I love this feature! (And I also do not think that this will halt all other development at Mozilla like some comments here imply)
- boogies 6y ago
  Isn’t evince capable of this and the default PDF viewer on GNOME?
  - krastanov 6y ago
    I have had evince fail render forms, but okular (the KDE default) has worked pretty well.
  - jhoechtl 6y ago
    Gnome - no. Okular the KDE counterpart works very fine.
  - folmar 6y ago
    Works fine for me.
- Jaxan 6y ago
  In Mac you can fill in PDFs with the builtin Preview app. I like it.
  - mkskm 6y ago
    There's also the paid app PDF Expert which is generally excellent.
  - chadrs 6y ago
    And yet every time I go to my parents' they've somehow installed Adobe Reader for Mac. I've deleted that app like 6 times.
dehrmann 6y ago
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.
- DHowett 6y ago
  > feature parity Like PDF support?
  - nacs 6y ago
    That’s what OP said yes. That features like PDF fill is essential while things like Pocket are basically non-core side projects.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      On rereading I agree with your interpretation, but it's easy to read "all these side projects" as referring to the PDF reader.
    - bad_user 6y ago
      Pocket is an acquired company, the integration with FF has been minimal (it does less than the Chrome extension ;)) and I'm pretty sure it pays for itself.
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    Exactly. He meant this is the sort of thing they should be doing. Not Pocket and WebXR.
- kodablah 6y ago
  > 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. A bit off topic from the post at hand, but my gripe was the opposite. The relentless pursuit of parity made them indistinguishable giving users no reason to switch (and taking dev time away from distinguishing features). Granted the pursuit of users instead of principles is its own folly that's hard to overcome when money is needed.
saghm 6y ago
I just found out that this feature was coming last night, and I hadn't realized that today was release day! I did discover that if you want to enable it on Firefox 80, you can toggle `pdfjs.renderInteractiveForms` in about:config
shanecleveland 6y ago
I've built fillable PDFs for a manufacturing business. Links are provided within to the company website to the PDF files, which typically now open in the browser, with varying degrees of reliability. Unfortunately, many people assume this is just another page of the website and that they should be able to interact with like any other web form. Always fun trying to explain this.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hapless 6y ago
PDF form support still doesn't work very well -- it cannot export filled fields correctly, nor will do they print correctly.
abrowne 6y ago
I actually like the pdf.js viewer enough that I use the chrome extension version on chromium. But I see it hasn't been updated in over a year now. Hopefully it will get updated! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndc...
doc_gunthrop 6y ago
Any chance Firefox will have built-in support for printing to PDF? There's a browser extension[1], but it was last updated 3 years ago. Seems the Chrome browser has had this feature for ages. 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-to-pdf-document/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-to-pdf-...
- jwatt 6y ago
  It's not ready for release yet, but if you flip the preference `print.tab_modal.enabled` to true you'll get the replacement printing interface which has a "Save as PDF" pseudo-printer.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- callalex 6y ago
  Does your operating system not support this natively from the print dialog?
  - auxym 6y ago
    On Windows at least, using the built-in PDF printer with Firefox results in text in the PDF file being converted to paths (not text). Huge file and you can't copy/paste. I've tried 3rd party PDF printers (PDFForge) and the result is the same, so I think it might a FF bug (or feature)? Chrome's save-as PDF produces actual text. It's the main reason I still have chrome installed.
    - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      That seems.... odd. I am on Firefox on Windows and I print to PDF all the time using the Windows built-in PDF printer ("Microsoft Print to PDF"), without issue. In fact sometimes that printer is the only one that can get things to format correctly! Something on your system might be interfering with the printing process.
    - 6y ago
flowerlad 6y ago
> After entering data into these fields you can download the file to have the filled out version saved to your computer. And then what? Fax it? Sounds like a missed opportunity to me. It would be nice if you can add a Submit button to have the data posted to the server, just like any other web-based form.
- Jaxan 6y ago
  That would be nice if websites support that. But in my experienced all PDF forms I fill in have to be printed and then signed and posted...
  - chairmanwow1 6y ago
    I haven't printed a PDF to sign in years. Why don't you just affix a digital image of your signature to the file? Save it and email it back to whomever.
    - Jaxan 6y ago
      Many places don’t accept emails. Sure you can sign digitally and then print.
    - emidln 6y ago
      This, and in the rare circumstance where they only accept regular mail or faxes, I use HelloFax.
- unbalancedevh 6y ago
  e-mail it, or save it for your records.
  - flowerlad 6y ago
    And what would the recipient do with the email? Type it in manually? You don't see any room for improvement here?
SigmundA 6y ago
Still waiting for the SVG backend to be fully implemented for high quality printing.
dgellow 6y ago
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 have that luxury! Being able to say to users to just install Firefox if they want to edit PDF is really good IMHO, way better than the current situation.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  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.
  - mey 6y ago
    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 https://musteat.org/images/hn/abobe_install.png
- mickotron 6y ago
  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.
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    And IIRC it's available on the windows store. It probably has msi as well.
boringg 6y ago
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.
- kibwen 6y ago
  Sure you can: find an ideologically motivated tech billionaire, buy Adobe, release a new version of PDF and make the spec an inaccessible trade secret, aggressively legislate against anyone who attempts to implement it, start charging for Reader, increase the price by a compounding 2% every year, and put that money towards a foundation with a purpose of openly designing and implementing a better, freely-licensed replacement. I predict this would only take 20 to 30 years. :)
  - boringg 6y ago
    Sounds like you've been thinking about this. You don't happen to be an ideologically motivated billionaire who happens to think the best thing for humanity and return on capital is to rebuild the pdf spec do you? * fingers crossed
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  Just in case you were looking for an actual answer to your question: "no".
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  Well, no, we can't just do that. But it's nice to dream.
  - topspin 6y ago
    Well, yes, we can, but the outcome will be far worse. The naive imagine "something better." The real world will interpret "better" as 27 half baked alternatives, 2 of which will work on something other than Chrome running on Windows.
sixhobbits 6y ago
today I took a screenshot of a PDF and uploaded it to an OCR service and copied the result into a doc. The PDF was text-based but every time I copied something it added millions of new lines and hyphens and extra text that wasn't shown on the page.
DesiLurker 6y ago
One Giant Leap for mankind! not /s.
skratlo 6y ago
Which PDF forms standard is this?
ansaso 6y ago
Seems so absurd that filling a form digitally is breaking tech news in 2020. PDF in a nutshell. Does anyone see a trend moving away from the PDF standard in recent years? Tried to look for data on it but found nothing.
INTPenis 6y ago
This is huge. I've felt like an outsider for years here because the gov uses a lot of online forms in PDF.
torresjrjr 6y ago
I just want to smooth scroll with vim keys (hjkl). Too much to ask? :/
- calcifer 6y ago
  How is that relevant to this thread?
- tarikozket 6y ago
  here, I'll make it easier for you to contribute to the project by providing you with the lines you'd need to update: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/83e1bbea6e23db8744420f70d8fb943962c867dd/web/app.js#L2861 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/83e1bbea6e23db8744420... https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/83e1bbea6e23db8744420f70d8fb943962c867dd/web/app.js#L2899 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/83e1bbea6e23db8744420...
godelski 6y ago
Can we just get support for math text? For years I accidentally print research papers from the browser only to have to open it back up in a non-browser PDF reader and reprint. With that and form fill I basically don't need another PDF reader, which is nice.
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
Will it support only the standardised kind of forms, or also the proprietary Adobe-only kind of forms? (Yes, there's two, and the latter are what Swedish administrative agencies use, so I'm forced to choose the “non-fillable PDF” option lest I get a file intentionally made unreadable to non-Adobe software.)
- phonon 6y ago
  Only the standardized acroforms. XFA forms are deprecated anyway... http://blog.pdfshareforms.com/pdf-2-0-release-bid-farewell-xfa-forms/ http://blog.pdfshareforms.com/pdf-2-0-release-bid-farewell-x...
  - xvilka 6y ago
    In theory. In practice you still can meet the XFA forms, especially for some governmental organizations.
    - treve 6y ago
      Yup! Keep running into having no way to fill in Canadian Government forms. It's all XFA.
      - phonon 6y ago
        Example? There are ways of converting XFA forms to Acroforms...
        phonon 6y ago
        Fwiw, I converted this random CA secured XFA form to an unlocked Acroform in a few seconds. From https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/forms/t5008.html https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publi... to https://slack-files.com/T02FQ9S94-F01BA4CS9QA-a692aafd70 https://slack-files.com/T02FQ9S94-F01BA4CS9QA-a692aafd70 Only difference I can see is the "Clear Data" scripted js button no longer works.
xvilka 6y ago
Poppler (a library behind most of the modern PDF open source viewers) still has many[1] issues with PDF Forms... [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?label_name%5B%5D=forms https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?labe...
xvilka 6y ago
Can it handle Cyrillic and Japanese text fields? For example, poppler can't solve this problem for 12 years[1] already. You can use the attached files to the issue for testing. [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/463 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/463
- usr1106 6y ago
  It's open source. Don't blame the developers that cannot read Cyrillic or Japanese. Blame those who can read it but don't contribute.
tapirl 6y ago
Many people needs clickable links in PDFs more. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454059 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454059
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tommica 6y ago
This is a nice feature to have!
joakim951 6y ago
SubmitForm buttons such as PdfAction.CreateSubmitForm from iText does still not work.
scoutt 6y ago
I think one of the first things I do after a clean Firefox installation is to set PDFs to be opened with the Windows default reader. Reading (and mostly searching text in) a PDF in the browser is terrible.
thayne 6y ago
About time.
wolco2 6y ago
Does anyone find the embedded viewer not usable for copy/paste situations where keeping the format is important. I always need to save and open with adobe reader.

1093 points by muxator 6y ago

I find the built-in PDF reader in Firefox to be bloat. It's OK, it works 95% of the time, but really I want to use a native PDF viewer. Is there a version of Firefox that removes this bloat? Given that Mozilla is very resource constrained, why are they working on features that aren't necessary?

danso 6y ago
A lot of everyday users likely benefit from being able to fill out PDFs in the browser.
snovv_crash 6y ago
I find it extremely convenient. Also I know a lot of security issues in PDF viewers are effectively solved by running it in the browser's JS sandbox.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  You could also disable Firefox's built-in PDF viewer and instead use an external PDF viewer that doesn't even support Javascript.
  - detaro 6y ago
    You misunderstand the argument the parent comment makes. It's not about Javscript in PDFs.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Not all PDF vulnerabilities involve JS though.
  - snovv_crash 6y ago
    Native PDF clients have had lots of security holes. In this case having the client written in JS means we can repurpose the battle hardened JS sandbox to also contain PDF exploits.
- zelly 6y ago
  Firefox's sandboxing incomplete or nonexistent (e.g. GPU process is not sandboxed on Linux).
Keycap 6y ago
I hope no one is listing to you. I don't want to start explaining to my mother, over the phone, how to install and use the pdf viewer anymore :|
anonymousab 6y ago
And here I found it much less bloated than the other free desktop PDF viewers. I think Mozilla's line of thought here is that PDF documents are widespread in the web, to the point where they are a de facto web document type. So it makes sense for a web browser to support them rather than calling out to a user's desktop program (though I assume you can configure it to do so instead). There's probably a bit of "our competitors do it, so we have to too" in there as well.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Given that Chrome/Edge also just added the feature, I would point out: All web browsers are using the same library for PDF handling, a feature in pdf.js ends up benefiting a lot of people. And the reasons for not requiring an outside PDF reader are major: It's yet another likely-to-have-vulnerabilities program people need to install, then update. In most cases, avoiding Adobe programs on your PC is a good way to avoid a lot of vulnerabilities.
- oefrha 6y ago
  > All web browsers are using the same library for PDF handling Chrome/Chromium uses PDFium, not PDF.js, so no. Not sure about Edge. PDFium has been able to fill out forms for a long time. What’s new for Chrome is the ability to save edited PDF (as fillable).
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    If Chrome doesn't use pdf.js, then neither would Edge, which is a Chrome fork. My original comment may have been mistaken.
    - oefrha 6y ago
      A Chromium fork could replace certain components if they so choose. The PDF rendering component would be one of the easier ones to replace. However, I was able to confirm that Edge uses extension ID mhjfbmdgcfjbbpaeojofohoefgiehjai to render PDF internally[1], same as Chrome, so indeed it's using PDFium. [1] The rendered PDF element would look like <embed id="plugin" type="application/x-google-chrome-pdf" src="..." stream-url="chrome-extension://mhjfbmdgcfjbbpaeojofohoefgiehjai/..." headers="..." ...> And here's the extension's manifest in Chromium source, where you can find the extension ID: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2baa2b094cdd60e980c1e32c2535b57b700e337f/chrome/browser/resources/pdf/manifest.json https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2baa2b094cdd60e980...
derefr 6y ago
I like that single-page PDFs stay in the browser. I don’t want to keep them; I just want to see them. Like any other web-page. I want to be able to hit back, or close the tab, and continue on with my day. And I also like that I can preview long-form PDFs in the browser, before choosing whether to save them and read them “for real.” Imagine if every time you opened a direct-linked JPEG image in your browser, it treated it as an attachment, downloading it and opening it in your external image-previewer app, rather than rendering it as a synthesized HTML DOM wrapper around the image. Wouldn’t you be annoyed by how cluttered your Downloads directory would get with random files you never actually wanted to save?
cptskippy 6y ago
Given the amount of PDF exploits over the years and the habit of browsers to automatically invoke your PDF viewer of choice either as a plug-in or call out, they're an easy target. Having a sandboxed PDF viewer that works 95% of the time is great. For those 5% circumstances where I am actively trying to view a PDF and it won't work in browser, I'll gladly go through the minimal effort to open it in an external viewer.
pessimizer 6y ago
It was once an add-on, and it was once disableable. It may still be disableable, but I'm sure there's some strange procedure you have to go through to do it.

nvr219 6y ago

FINALLY! Now I can finally uninstall Chrome. Of course, I do wish Sumatra supported filling forms. Then I could uninstall Firefox too! ;-)

MayeulC 6y ago
Okular works quite well for filling forms in my experience :)

Causality1 6y ago

Is there something hard about fillable forms on PDF? Why have a PDF viewer at all if it couldn't fill out a form?

foxdev 6y ago
While PDF is an open format on paper, in practice it's as proprietary as any ancient format. Supporting it in full is not trivial.
- core-questions 6y ago
  The real problem here is that, 20+ years on, printing to PDF is still a totally natural and easy-to-understand metaphor for a normal office desktop user; but producing HTML for the browser is still impossible for them. If we simply had print-to-HTML functionality which resulted in a document identical to what you view onscreen while editing, PDF could die the death it deserves. But HTML+CSS somehow manages to suck just as much for common usage, so it persists.
  - foxdev 6y ago
    I wish epub would catch on for more than books. An epub is just HTML and CSS in a zip file, and a large part of the world population has a device than can load it and present it cleanly.
derefr 6y ago
> Is there something hard about fillable forms on PDF? In the sense of a “form” just being lines on paper that you can arbitrarily add some text to — no, that’s easy. Likewise, in the sense of a “form” being some defined input regions that accept your keystrokes and turn them into new text DOM nodes in the PDF itself — easy enough. Though, unlike HTML, there’s no concept of an <input> tag that just has the semantics of accepting keystrokes and turning them into (persisted) input; instead, this all has to be done through scripting [i.e. writing event-handlers, or having some PDF authoring software generate them]; and there are several incompatible scripting languages for PDF that get used, some of which are proprietary with no open specification. But, doing form validation? Or, worse yet, making one of those fancy PDF forms that auto-calculates fields like an Excel spreadsheet? Now you’re getting into the hairy stuff, because IIRC none of the open-standard PDF scripting systems provide these sorts of mechanisms, so these are inherently proprietary things. And when I say “proprietary”, I mean “like old versions of Word or Photoshop, where each version emitted its own in-memory data-structures to disk without formal serialization; and it was the job of authors of future versions to write importers to deserialize whatever format resulted.”

voldacar 6y ago

Truly revolutionary tech

rpastuszak 6y ago
Well, it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package, so in a way—yes.
- inetknght 6y ago
  > it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package Uh, what? Firefox supports javascript. PDFs support javascript. Javascript empowers tracking.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    Firefox PDF support is actually Javascript. https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js
  - MCOfficer 6y ago
    following that logic - every browser that supports cookies comes with a tracking package - electron comes with a tracking package - every language interpreter, runtime or compiler is a tracking package. - your OS can run tracking software, thus coming with a tracking package. - Anyone carrying their phone comes with a tracking package Hang on, did you just post something on the internet? Your HN account comes with a tracking package!
- gspr 6y ago
  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).
  - rpastuszak 6y ago
    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.

spidersouris 6y ago

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?

cpeterso 6y ago
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?
brendandahl 6y ago
Please file a bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&component=PDF%20Viewer https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...
- mattashii 6y ago
  I've seen the same happen, so I've filed a bug with my reproduction: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1666575 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1666575

steviedotboston 6y ago

Chrome has had this forever, right?

kebman 6y ago

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.

belval 6y ago
As someone still working with PDF processing, I can confirm that it doesn't get easier.
divbzero 6y ago
I had to handle action buttons for a PDF once. I swam out from America a long long ways before turning back. Might have spotted you middle of the ocean.
- meshaneian 6y ago
  Legit username warns of one PDF peril.
rvense 6y ago
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...
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  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?
  - willis77 6y ago
    The digits of pi contain every pdf that ever could and ever will exist.

paulpauper 6y ago

I wold like to see a version that allows forms to be signed

speedmagnet 6y ago
Microsoft Edge allows you to draw on PDFs and save them easily. I use it for signing all the time.
- anaganisk 6y ago
  I think he meant digital signature
  - nip 6y ago
    In case he meant regular (drawn) signature, it can be done via Preview on Mac. For a local web use, I built for myself https://formulairemagique.fr https://formulairemagique.fr for this very reason
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      Preview.app is just so good. It’s my favourite default Mac app by miles. It and terminal.app have survived the thing Apple does where they update applications and remove all the application’s power to achieve anything.
    - tendersej 6y ago
      good job on the simple UI! I think it will prove useful next time I have a form to fill.
- shoguning 6y ago
  I was pleasantly surprised by this recently. Just worked using my touchscreen laptop. So rare on Windows.

marvindanig 6y ago

Why is Firefox spending all their money and goodwill on a piece of technology that should be done away with? PDF is a dork. It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages. Somewhere in the comments below, it is mentioned that supporting PDFs is a non-trivial piece of technology. May be! Even steam engines have non-trivial technology under the hood.

beervirus 6y ago
There are lots of use cases for PDF where a web page is totally unsuitable.
- marvindanig 6y ago
  As someone working on formats, I disagree with your generalization. But let's get into specifics. List the things about PDF that you believe can't be done with web pages?
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    It's easy to dismiss things in their entirety and then require someone else to "prove you wrong". Why don't you prove you're right instead? Why don't you list all of things that PDFs can do that can also be done with web pages?
    - marvindanig 6y ago
      Sure, here's my list: everything + more. There's nothing a PDF can do that a webpage can't. In fact there are a hundred of things that a webpage can do, but a PDF can't. Including, form fields, input fields and seamless form submissions. Webpages can also do this: https://bubblin.io/cover/official-handbook-by-marvin-danig#frontmatter https://bubblin.io/cover/official-handbook-by-marvin-danig#f... Disclosure: It's my work.
      - cptskippy 6y ago

getpost 6y ago

“After entering data into these fields you can download the file to have the filled out version saved to your computer.” What’s the use case? Printing out filled-in forms? But otherwise, who would want the PDF in electronic format? It doesn’t seem like a practical way for users to submit data.

detaro 6y ago
Printing is one use case. Also plenty places that want filled out forms uploaded, e-mailed, ... + it allows you to keep a copy with what you entered.
- getpost 6y ago
  That's my point. Other than printing a nice looking form (which includes faxing), the content of the field data is hard to reuse. Searching PDF content on your own hard drive is problematic. Are there utilities that extract PDF field data and submit it to a database? I'd be grateful to see examples. What about field validation? The PDF may have some minor validation, but that's no substitute for the validation done in a DBMS. If you want users to be able to save a nice looking form, you'd still want the data entered online directly into a DBMS. I'd offer a "download PDF of your input" as an option, for example.
  - toyg 6y ago
    > the content of the field data is hard to reuse. A lot of people don't care, because they come from forms in cartaceous - where they have to manually retype everything anyway. For many, their "DBMS" will be an Excel sheet with a dozen rows. The more advanced types likely have some Adobe software that does all the magic. Fillable PDF forms are really seen as a courtesy to users more than anything particularly useful to the emitter.
  - detaro 6y ago
    Sure, its a structured format, so you totally can extract the individual fields. AFAIK Adobe sells a server product that does that, but I'm sure there's competitors and I have seen the underlying parsing in feature in PDF libraries before. That said, plenty of users of PDFs have a very paper-based/manual workflow still, and not the motivation and expertise to run and update an online form thing. Or they need to have the ability to handle odd inputs anyways, because paper forms have even worse input validation. And from a browser/user perspective, the feature here is useful because people expect me to handle PDFs and do not provide nice web forms. They might have terrible reasons for doing so, but I still need to live with that.

elric 6y ago

That built in PDF viewer is another feature that could have been an addon. It's bloat which increases the browser's attack surface. It's completely unneeded given that just about every OS ships with some kind of PDF reader out of the box.

axelf4 6y ago
> It's bloat which increases the browser's attack surface. AFAICT PDF.js is just another JavaScript application and thus as sandboxed as any other website.
- est31 6y ago
  It's a js application and thus less exploitable than your average C application with tons of unsound code, but IIRC it belongs to the class of "privileged js" layer that Firefox has, so has special rights that usual website js doesn't have.
morpheuskafka 6y ago
The built-in PDF reader on Windows is literally to open the PDF in Edge.. so not very good UX for Firefox and also a good argument that browsers are expected to have PDF readers.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
toyg 6y ago
Thank Google - Chrome was the first browser to ship with a pdf reader, and people loved it. Now it's just expected that any browser should have a workable PDF reader built-in.
sp332 6y ago
The alternative was installing an Adobe plugin with no sandbox, so it made sense at the time.
godshatter 6y ago
I would like to see Mozilla modularize Firefox more. Browsers are such huge beasts that contain everything imaginable plus the kitchen sink these days. It would be nice for these kinds of features to be add-ons that can be disabled or deleted if their functionality is not needed or desired, freeing resources for other use. They can be part of the initial install so that Mozilla can provide the browser as they envision it, but be able to be removed for those who have other ideas of what their browser should consist of. I don't know how technically feasible that is with their code, but it makes sense to me from a developer standpoint.

burtonator 6y ago

I'm the author of Polar (https://getpolarized.io/ 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've had to fork it internally and work on typescript bindings and other features to get it to work. They seem to have a silly policy of only allow developers to use a subset of the API not the whole API itself so that it doesn't look like PDF.js (which I don't understand). A lot of the functionality just isn't available otherwise.

0x6A75616E 6y ago
Hey! Polarized looks pretty cool. Question, has this feature (forms) been merged into the public pdf.js master yet?
52-6F-62 6y ago
I've been working on an internal tool for my company using the same library. It's saved me a ton of work, but my experience has been similar to yours. I've even had to lock in to a much older version for want of putting a lot more work on my plate since the API seems to have changed a fair bit. (well, between it and JSDOM which I am using to some rendering on the server). And like you I've had to write a bunch of the bindings/definitions myself or just reduce them to nil (declare module "yadda/yadday/thing" as any)—which is thankfully permissible since it just needs to be built once and run "forever" with near-zero need for feature additions, etc. All to extract images in a routine fashion. Just the same, I'm still immensely thankful they've published the library as OSS.
- exikyut 6y ago
  I'm benignly curious how pdfimages explodes in your use case.
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago

_coveredInBees 6y ago

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.

kibwen 6y ago
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.
- Eduard 6y ago
  I don't agree. PDF is fine to be some binary blob to download just as most other binary blob formats are. Would you expect to have .exe files being directly interpreted by a browser?
  - jiveturkey 6y ago
    > Would you expect to have .exe files being directly interpreted by a browser? no, i wouldn't. and yet here we are: wasm.
- jmiserez 6y ago
  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.
  - davidu 6y ago
    https://beta.rive.app/ https://beta.rive.app/ (OSS runtime, xplatform, native rendering)

bawolff 6y ago

Finally. Its a nightmere trying to fill out a pdf form on linux.

kevincox 6y ago
I very rarely have any issues using evince. What PDF viewer are you using?
franga2000 6y ago
Okular can handle basically everything for me, except for those Adobe-proprietary ones that require JS and all kinds of other dumb features that only Acrobat supports.
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  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!
  - mgbmtl 6y ago
    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.
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      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.
  - ReverseCold 6y ago
    Okular should work fine on GNOME, but you might need extra disk space for all the KDE dependencies.
    - 6y ago

austincheney 6y ago

Does this support digital signatures via signing certificate?

blackbrokkoli 6y ago

I have a feeling this thread has a strong bias from highly automated valley life. In more provincial regions and even just much of Europe lots of forms have to be filled out and printed. It is not something you have to everyday or something, but the existing solutions suck massively. You either have to use Adobe, which requires Windows (or Mac, I suppose) and your firstborn or use some massively shady online service. So personally, I love this feature! (And I also do not think that this will halt all other development at Mozilla like some comments here imply)

boogies 6y ago
Isn’t evince capable of this and the default PDF viewer on GNOME?
- krastanov 6y ago
  I have had evince fail render forms, but okular (the KDE default) has worked pretty well.
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  Gnome - no. Okular the KDE counterpart works very fine.
- folmar 6y ago
  Works fine for me.
Jaxan 6y ago
In Mac you can fill in PDFs with the builtin Preview app. I like it.
- mkskm 6y ago
  There's also the paid app PDF Expert which is generally excellent.
- chadrs 6y ago
  And yet every time I go to my parents' they've somehow installed Adobe Reader for Mac. I've deleted that app like 6 times.

dehrmann 6y ago

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.

DHowett 6y ago
> feature parity Like PDF support?
- nacs 6y ago
  That’s what OP said yes. That features like PDF fill is essential while things like Pocket are basically non-core side projects.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    On rereading I agree with your interpretation, but it's easy to read "all these side projects" as referring to the PDF reader.
  - bad_user 6y ago
    Pocket is an acquired company, the integration with FF has been minimal (it does less than the Chrome extension ;)) and I'm pretty sure it pays for itself.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Exactly. He meant this is the sort of thing they should be doing. Not Pocket and WebXR.
kodablah 6y ago
> 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. A bit off topic from the post at hand, but my gripe was the opposite. The relentless pursuit of parity made them indistinguishable giving users no reason to switch (and taking dev time away from distinguishing features). Granted the pursuit of users instead of principles is its own folly that's hard to overcome when money is needed.

saghm 6y ago

I just found out that this feature was coming last night, and I hadn't realized that today was release day! I did discover that if you want to enable it on Firefox 80, you can toggle `pdfjs.renderInteractiveForms` in about:config

shanecleveland 6y ago

I've built fillable PDFs for a manufacturing business. Links are provided within to the company website to the PDF files, which typically now open in the browser, with varying degrees of reliability. Unfortunately, many people assume this is just another page of the website and that they should be able to interact with like any other web form. Always fun trying to explain this.

deleted 6y ago

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hapless 6y ago

PDF form support still doesn't work very well -- it cannot export filled fields correctly, nor will do they print correctly.

abrowne 6y ago

I actually like the pdf.js viewer enough that I use the chrome extension version on chromium. But I see it hasn't been updated in over a year now. Hopefully it will get updated! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndc...

doc_gunthrop 6y ago

Any chance Firefox will have built-in support for printing to PDF? There's a browser extension[1], but it was last updated 3 years ago. Seems the Chrome browser has had this feature for ages. 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-to-pdf-document/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-to-pdf-...

jwatt 6y ago
It's not ready for release yet, but if you flip the preference `print.tab_modal.enabled` to true you'll get the replacement printing interface which has a "Save as PDF" pseudo-printer.
- deleted 6y ago
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callalex 6y ago
Does your operating system not support this natively from the print dialog?
- auxym 6y ago
  On Windows at least, using the built-in PDF printer with Firefox results in text in the PDF file being converted to paths (not text). Huge file and you can't copy/paste. I've tried 3rd party PDF printers (PDFForge) and the result is the same, so I think it might a FF bug (or feature)? Chrome's save-as PDF produces actual text. It's the main reason I still have chrome installed.
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    That seems.... odd. I am on Firefox on Windows and I print to PDF all the time using the Windows built-in PDF printer ("Microsoft Print to PDF"), without issue. In fact sometimes that printer is the only one that can get things to format correctly! Something on your system might be interfering with the printing process.
  - 6y ago

flowerlad 6y ago

> After entering data into these fields you can download the file to have the filled out version saved to your computer. And then what? Fax it? Sounds like a missed opportunity to me. It would be nice if you can add a Submit button to have the data posted to the server, just like any other web-based form.

Jaxan 6y ago
That would be nice if websites support that. But in my experienced all PDF forms I fill in have to be printed and then signed and posted...
- chairmanwow1 6y ago
  I haven't printed a PDF to sign in years. Why don't you just affix a digital image of your signature to the file? Save it and email it back to whomever.
  - Jaxan 6y ago
    Many places don’t accept emails. Sure you can sign digitally and then print.
  - emidln 6y ago
    This, and in the rare circumstance where they only accept regular mail or faxes, I use HelloFax.
unbalancedevh 6y ago
e-mail it, or save it for your records.
- flowerlad 6y ago
  And what would the recipient do with the email? Type it in manually? You don't see any room for improvement here?

SigmundA 6y ago

Still waiting for the SVG backend to be fully implemented for high quality printing.

dgellow 6y ago

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 have that luxury! Being able to say to users to just install Firefox if they want to edit PDF is really good IMHO, way better than the current situation.

maxerickson 6y ago
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.
- mey 6y ago
  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 https://musteat.org/images/hn/abobe_install.png
mickotron 6y ago
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.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  And IIRC it's available on the windows store. It probably has msi as well.

boringg 6y ago

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.

kibwen 6y ago
Sure you can: find an ideologically motivated tech billionaire, buy Adobe, release a new version of PDF and make the spec an inaccessible trade secret, aggressively legislate against anyone who attempts to implement it, start charging for Reader, increase the price by a compounding 2% every year, and put that money towards a foundation with a purpose of openly designing and implementing a better, freely-licensed replacement. I predict this would only take 20 to 30 years. :)
- boringg 6y ago
  Sounds like you've been thinking about this. You don't happen to be an ideologically motivated billionaire who happens to think the best thing for humanity and return on capital is to rebuild the pdf spec do you? * fingers crossed
rossdavidh 6y ago
Just in case you were looking for an actual answer to your question: "no".
jrochkind1 6y ago
Well, no, we can't just do that. But it's nice to dream.
- topspin 6y ago
  Well, yes, we can, but the outcome will be far worse. The naive imagine "something better." The real world will interpret "better" as 27 half baked alternatives, 2 of which will work on something other than Chrome running on Windows.

sixhobbits 6y ago

today I took a screenshot of a PDF and uploaded it to an OCR service and copied the result into a doc. The PDF was text-based but every time I copied something it added millions of new lines and hyphens and extra text that wasn't shown on the page.

DesiLurker 6y ago

One Giant Leap for mankind! not /s.

skratlo 6y ago

Which PDF forms standard is this?

ansaso 6y ago

Seems so absurd that filling a form digitally is breaking tech news in 2020. PDF in a nutshell. Does anyone see a trend moving away from the PDF standard in recent years? Tried to look for data on it but found nothing.

INTPenis 6y ago

This is huge. I've felt like an outsider for years here because the gov uses a lot of online forms in PDF.

torresjrjr 6y ago

I just want to smooth scroll with vim keys (hjkl). Too much to ask? :/

calcifer 6y ago
How is that relevant to this thread?
tarikozket 6y ago
here, I'll make it easier for you to contribute to the project by providing you with the lines you'd need to update: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/83e1bbea6e23db8744420f70d8fb943962c867dd/web/app.js#L2861 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/83e1bbea6e23db8744420... https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/83e1bbea6e23db8744420f70d8fb943962c867dd/web/app.js#L2899 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/83e1bbea6e23db8744420...

godelski 6y ago

Can we just get support for math text? For years I accidentally print research papers from the browser only to have to open it back up in a non-browser PDF reader and reprint. With that and form fill I basically don't need another PDF reader, which is nice.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

Will it support only the standardised kind of forms, or also the proprietary Adobe-only kind of forms? (Yes, there's two, and the latter are what Swedish administrative agencies use, so I'm forced to choose the “non-fillable PDF” option lest I get a file intentionally made unreadable to non-Adobe software.)

phonon 6y ago
Only the standardized acroforms. XFA forms are deprecated anyway... http://blog.pdfshareforms.com/pdf-2-0-release-bid-farewell-xfa-forms/ http://blog.pdfshareforms.com/pdf-2-0-release-bid-farewell-x...
- xvilka 6y ago
  In theory. In practice you still can meet the XFA forms, especially for some governmental organizations.
  - treve 6y ago
    Yup! Keep running into having no way to fill in Canadian Government forms. It's all XFA.
    - phonon 6y ago
      Example? There are ways of converting XFA forms to Acroforms...
      - phonon 6y ago
        Fwiw, I converted this random CA secured XFA form to an unlocked Acroform in a few seconds. From https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/forms/t5008.html https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publi... to https://slack-files.com/T02FQ9S94-F01BA4CS9QA-a692aafd70 https://slack-files.com/T02FQ9S94-F01BA4CS9QA-a692aafd70 Only difference I can see is the "Clear Data" scripted js button no longer works.

xvilka 6y ago

Poppler (a library behind most of the modern PDF open source viewers) still has many[1] issues with PDF Forms... [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?label_name%5B%5D=forms https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?labe...

xvilka 6y ago

Can it handle Cyrillic and Japanese text fields? For example, poppler can't solve this problem for 12 years[1] already. You can use the attached files to the issue for testing. [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/463 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/463

usr1106 6y ago
It's open source. Don't blame the developers that cannot read Cyrillic or Japanese. Blame those who can read it but don't contribute.

tapirl 6y ago

Many people needs clickable links in PDFs more. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454059 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454059

deleted 6y ago

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tommica 6y ago

This is a nice feature to have!

joakim951 6y ago

SubmitForm buttons such as PdfAction.CreateSubmitForm from iText does still not work.

scoutt 6y ago

I think one of the first things I do after a clean Firefox installation is to set PDFs to be opened with the Windows default reader. Reading (and mostly searching text in) a PDF in the browser is terrible.

thayne 6y ago

About time.

wolco2 6y ago

Does anyone find the embedded viewer not usable for copy/paste situations where keeping the format is important. I always need to save and open with adobe reader.