9 ms·

Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer

177 points by xojoc 5y ago

Stampo00 5y ago
The new PDF form rendering is working great for me. Thank you, Firefox! I don't love PDF files, but it's more convenient for me to deal with them in my favorite browser.
gsliepen 5y ago
> Thanks to our Telemetry, we discovered that many forms contain and use embedded JavaScript code (yes, that’s a thing!). There are two disturbing things in that sentence. At least the JavaScript I can see a reason for, it can check whether your input is correct and maybe autofill or things like that, and should of course be sandboxed. The telemetry part is more scary.
- djbusby 5y ago
  Scary and also helpful. Over reaching telemetry bad. But pragmatic, anonymous, usage metrics? Maybe worked this time.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  It would be possible to implement telemetry that would answer these questions in mostly unobjectionable fashion, but without more information one can see how this could be described as "scary". I certainly hope that forms aren't just being sent back home to Mozilla as-is. However, a monthly ping with statistics like "out of between 50 and 200 documents, between 10 and 50 of them used javascript" wouldn't harm anything. They could even add a random error to the statistics...
  - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    I often do not have a problem with the information telemetry collects: I take issue with the entitlement to it a new breed of awful app developers have. They think they have the right to use my device for information collection without my permission. If Firefox occasionally showed me a report on some metrics it collected and asked me if I was okay sending it to Mozilla, I'd probably be fine with it. However, the choice to take it without my consent will always be opposed.
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      Do they do that? It's been a long time since I installed Firefox, but as far as I can tell there are very visible settings for controlling the telemetry that they collect.
      - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
        There are settings, however, they are enabled by default to silently send telemetry, and they also implement new ways of collecting telemetry, with new settings to opt out of it, on an "every few months" basis. So it's a constant battle of monitoring what behavior they're up to and turning it off.
  - tjoff 5y ago
    It would be possible to figure this out without any sort of telemetry at all. It really feels like a forced way to try and shoe-horn something good to say about telemetry when it is something everyone that deals with PDFs have known since forever. And if that is the best they have to show for it ...
    - roca 5y ago
      How would you figure this out without telemetry? A Web crawl could tell you how many PDF documents on the Web use forms, but it won't tell you often your users encounter those documents --- many documents aren't on the public Web, and some documents will be encountered far more often than others.
      - blondin 5y ago
        > How would you figure this out without telemetry? the way the world has done it forever... a survey? it is concerning. if Firefox is doing it, they are all doing it. i am not going to be opening PDFs in browsers. this is ridiculous.
        roca 5y ago
        A survey for this is going to be useless for getting unbiased data.
        charcircuit 5y ago
        A survey would be heavily biased. Telemetry will have much less bias (there is still some since people who disable telemetry have their usage ignored) With better data you can make improvements that help more actual users instead of just focusing on what vocal minorities think.
      - tjoff 5y ago
        The vast majority of questions like that are quite obvious. Now what you might miss is that in some country where special circumstances led to an unusual high use of a certain feature. But this is not that case. More importantly, even with telemetry. Is the JavaScript adding something or is it solely used for tracking? Is it appreciated by the users? Maybe 80% of input validation is so broken that they only serve to block legitimate input and waste cpu-cycles. More than telemetry you need common sense. It is not apparent how the telemetry influenced this in any way.
- arbitrage 5y ago
  What I find disturbing is that you are complaining about the included javascript in forms at this late a date. Where have you been for like the last fifteen years?
  - rudian 5y ago
    Fifteen years is a long time. I’m sure some HN users weren’t even born yet. Not everyone needs to care about everything all the time. I would complain about JS in PDF too, but I don’t have a voice anyway.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  > The telemetry part is more scary. There's a nice big section in the Firefox settings called "Firefox Data Collection and Use" that has some fairly fine-grained options for what data you feed back to Firefox. I have all of mine unchecked, but I could imagine that if I were more community-minded, or if I were interested in actively contributing to FF's development day-to-day (for example running on nightly builds) I would activate those. FWIW, I do explicitly allow telemetry for the applications I buy licenses for and use for my work; it's in my best interest for those programs to be improved as efficiently as possible (and to have my use patterns be part of the corpus used to prioritize those improvements), and it makes it easier for me to report issues.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    Also, unless you dismiss it, there's a clear button to read to read their privacy policy and set telemetry (unless you're using the nightly-weekly builds, in this case they state in no ambiguous terms that you cannot disable it).
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    > that has some fairly fine-grained options for what data you feed back to Firefox I looked into these settings but I can only find 4 checkboxes. Which of the four checkboxes would this telemetry fall under? Is this a study, the result of crash report logging, or is it "data about your interactions with Firefox [..] (such as number of open tabs and windows; number of webpages visited; number and type of installed Firefox Add-ons; and session length) and Firefox features offered by Mozilla or our partners (such as interaction with Firefox search features and search partner referrals)" I know Firefox collects some technical tracking, but there is no up to date overview of what tracking is actually done. Is there a list of parameters tracked like Microsoft published [1] after the outcry about their terrible tracking? The privacy policy is vague and the documentation for developers [2] contains phrases such as "opaque prio-specific payload. Like { a: <base64 string>, b: <base64 string> }" which isn't exactly useful. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-windows-diagnostic-data-events-and-fields-2004 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-wi... [2]: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/telemetry/data/prio-ping.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...
- sildur 5y ago
  Not only that. If they wanted to add form support they should have read the specs, instead of blindly relying on their (very questionable) telemetry. The fact they had to find via telemetry something that every developer who had interacted with a PDF with forms knew (that they have JS) is very worrying. I'm expecting a long long list of bug reports when they start finding the mountains of corner cases not shown by their "telemetry".
BitwiseFool 5y ago
To this day, I do not understand why it is practically impossible to simply rotate a PDF and save it in its rotated form without downloading some additional PDF application. Edit: On Windows. I envy Preview in MacOS
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Might want to specify the platform. on macOS that's like 2 clicks in Preview.app.
  - rudian 5y ago
    It’s a single key shortcut. The document is then auto saved. Preview.app is king.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Is it actually rotated or does it just remember that that document is supposed to be rotated? In other words if you emailed it to me would it still be rotated when I opened it?
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      Actual PDF rotate. In other news, that's precisely why I'm weary to open PDFs in (edit: recent versions of) macOS because it autosaves, and I need to have a bit-perfect copy of said PDF. I mean, I open it in Firefox or Chrome, and this is just a problem that is specific to my circumstance, but it still bugs me.
      - marcellus23 5y ago
        I think there’s an option in System Preferences to disable auto saving
        zinekeller 5y ago
        That's if I do own my own Mac, but this is in situations like if I'm stuck in the marketing division and needed to view a file immediately.
InitialLastName 5y ago
Why is it that, a ~decade since MacOS started including forms and markups in their default PDF app (Preview) there still isn't a sane PDF editor for Windows? Chrome and Firefox's PDF viewers don't have editing, Edge has editing and forms but bonkers window management (sometimes PDFs open with Edge but not in an Edge window). Adobe Reader DC still tries to ship with malware, and is license-restricted. What gives?
- tpmx 5y ago
  Apple did it because they were the underdog 15-20 years ago. Microsoft doesn't give a shit. There's no realistic market opportunity for a small third party to get a sizeable amount of revenue either, with Adobe looming. I kinda miss the early 90s when we actually had competing software "houses" with some financial muscle.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    Wrong answer, at least for a time. Microsoft was actually sued by Adobe over the PDF implementation with Office 2007 (before it was standardised in ISO, that was circa 2008-9 if I remember correctly). That's also the reason that XPS (the weird Microsoft format, not Dell laptops) exists. Nowadays though, I don't really know since Microsoft has successfully overturned that case (probably because of Adobe being Adobe?).
    - tpmx 5y ago
      So, not really the wrong answer for the past 12 years or so, then.
      - not2b 5y ago
        The number of years depends on when the various patents expire. Does anyone know?
  - motform 5y ago
    preview.app has been around since NextSTEP, which used display postscript for its windowing engine. Having a first-class pdf reader falls out pretty naturally.
frankjr 5y ago
I'm glad PDF.js' development continues. I completely missed that they have abandoned the plan to move to PDFium (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project).
- zinekeller 5y ago
  Mozilla developers at the time actually have other plans with the Pepper plugin support: Adobe Flash (since that Chrome's Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) is actually miles better and secure than the Netscape [-era - ed.] Plugin API or NPAPI). They abandoned Mortar when Adobe have announced that it will retire Flash. (Also, PDF.js is now a misnomer: it now mainly uses WebAssembly.)
  - muizelaar 5y ago
    It doesn't. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language Files Lines Blank Comment Code -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JavaScript 355 144428 13069 16759 114600 JSON 12 24385 2 0 24383 CSS 12 3302 407 183 2712 HTML 32 1638 176 230 1232 Markdown 19 733 221 0 512 TypeScript 1 20 4 2 14 CoffeeScript 1 15 2 0 13 YAML 1 4 0 1 3 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total 433 174525 13881 17175 143469 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    - zinekeller 5y ago
      I'm referring to the one built-into Firefox, not the HTML version. Even comparing the HTML one, this is misleading: the PDF.js compilation step means that there are WebAssembly code written nominally in JavaScript, namely those that handles font rendering and complex graphics (before pushing into the canvas, which by necessity is done in JS).
fzzzy 5y ago
Remember when Mozilla management promised that they were going to kill pdf.js (why?) and replace it with the chrome pdf viewer, then wasted a few years not pulling it off? Good times.
- jfk13 5y ago
  Sometimes plans don't work out (and/or circumstances change), and changing them is the sensible thing to do. (I don't know details of this specific case, and whether/why the plans and decisions made sense at any given time.)
- zinekeller 5y ago
  I'll copy out this comment of mine in response to an analogous question: > Mozilla developers at the time actually have other plans with the Pepper plugin support: Adobe Flash (since that Chrome's Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) is actually miles better and secure than the Netscape [-era - ed.] Plugin API or NPAPI). They abandoned Mortar (the name of the project) when Adobe have announced that it will retire Flash.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Mozilla management have never been up to the job; clearly their pay needs to grow drastically, to attract better talent. /s
  - fzzzy 5y ago
    heheheheheheh
alacritas0 5y ago
It's impressive how slowly progress has been made on the firefox pdf viewer. They can't print out pages which aren't blurry from the viewer even though they've had 8 years notice: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=811002 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=811002
- muizelaar 5y ago
  That bug is closed. What PDF and platform do you see blurriness on?
  - SigmundA 5y ago
    https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/2750 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/2750 It's because pdf.js does not print vector and instead is just printing canvas bitmaps. If they ever get the SVG backend working its will finally have good print quality without trying to get OOM doing measly 300 dpi canvas.
fguerraz 5y ago
I wonder when Mozilla is going to start to include ads in their pdf renderer. I mean it wouldn't really be "ads", more like suggested extra pages provided by trusted partners...
- function_seven 5y ago
  They could really add value by using AI to detect certain PDF forms. If the form you're filling appears to be a tax return, then a Helpful Message from a Trusted Partner would appear ("TurboTax users average $300 larger refunds"). Residential mortgage application? "Shop Rates and Save"
emilsedgh 5y ago
PDFJS is fantastic. But PDFJS folks, how can you do such a subpar job at documentation? There is really no documentation available on pdfjs. Or a proper changelog. Like in this article they talk about JS execution in pdfjs. And how they have a solution called quickjs. _no_ documentation whatsoever about how to use it. This has been their documentation for years: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/api/ https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/api/ Had I created something as complex and magnificent as pdfjs I would've documented _the hell_ out of it. I get that pdfjs usage in normal web is not their priority and what they care about is the Firefox pdf viewer but I'm sure they would've had a much better contribution rate had they done better api docs.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Yeah, it’s a strange choice considering they ask people to not use their viewer unmodified…
- gervwyk 5y ago
  Shameless plug. I recently wrote an article for Lowdefy (co-founder here) for using pdfMake with Lowdefy to generate pdfs. Works really great and easy, perhaps the next step is to add a pdf render block using pdfJs. See the article: https://docs.lowdefy.com/generate-pdf-document-from-data https://docs.lowdefy.com/generate-pdf-document-from-data (edit: confused pdfJs for jsPdf)
  - gervwyk 5y ago
    Sorry I confused pdfJs for jsPdf. Perhaps the next step is to build a Lowdefy block that uses pdfJs to render pdfs :)
- rectang 5y ago
  I recently had to implement a custom PDF viewer using PDF.js. It took a loooong time, because PDF.js is so confusing to work with. We went way over what we thought was a conservative time estimate. :( It's not just a matter of documentation, but API design. Beyond the bare minimum functionality, you'll need bits and pieces of semi-public API. For example, if you want to use the "text layer" (for selectable text) you'll need a CSS file which is inside the `web/` directory. But what's in `web/` is incomplete and not officially supported.
c0nsumer 5y ago
I wish the Firefox PDF viewer performed a little better... Lately as I've been working on mapping projects and want to view large PDFs I've found many which need to be saved and opened in Preview.app instead of the browser. This is a great example of a map which views horribly in Firefox (try zooming in) but works great in Preview.app: https://www.bia.gov/sites/bia.gov/files/assets/public/webteam/pdf/idc1-028635.pdf https://www.bia.gov/sites/bia.gov/files/assets/public/webtea...
- muizelaar 5y ago
  I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1736108 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1736108 for that case.
  - c0nsumer 5y ago
    Well, thank you!
xvilka 5y ago
PDF Forms are tricky. Though I would prefer if more attention given to the native PDF libraries like poppler[1] that drive Okular, Evince, Zathura, and many other PDF viewers. There are long-standing bugs[2] with PDF Forms support, especially with non-English languages[3][4][5]. [1] https://poppler.freedesktop.org/ https://poppler.freedesktop.org/ [2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?label_name%5B%5D=forms https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?labe... [3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/463 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/463 [4] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/230 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/230 [5] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/364 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/364
jillesvangurp 5y ago
It seems to me that with WASM, it's easier than ever to have good cross platform and performant implementations for dealing with pdf and many other file formats in a sane way. There is a lot of open source software out there that probably already can be compiled to run in a browser with WASM.
denton-scratch 5y ago
I have a learned aversion to PDF features such as forms. It's partly because HTML already has pretty good forms; and partly because of the long history of gross PDF security failures by Adobe. I think a PDF viewer (I prefer "reader", because that's what Adobe called their free product) is for viewing PDFs. The point of PDF, to my mind, was that you got a much higher level of control of typography and design than you could get with HTML. So designers and marketers liked it. I have never bought into interactive PDFs.

177 points by xojoc 5y ago

The new PDF form rendering is working great for me. Thank you, Firefox! I don't love PDF files, but it's more convenient for me to deal with them in my favorite browser.

gsliepen 5y ago

> Thanks to our Telemetry, we discovered that many forms contain and use embedded JavaScript code (yes, that’s a thing!). There are two disturbing things in that sentence. At least the JavaScript I can see a reason for, it can check whether your input is correct and maybe autofill or things like that, and should of course be sandboxed. The telemetry part is more scary.

djbusby 5y ago
Scary and also helpful. Over reaching telemetry bad. But pragmatic, anonymous, usage metrics? Maybe worked this time.
jessaustin 5y ago
It would be possible to implement telemetry that would answer these questions in mostly unobjectionable fashion, but without more information one can see how this could be described as "scary". I certainly hope that forms aren't just being sent back home to Mozilla as-is. However, a monthly ping with statistics like "out of between 50 and 200 documents, between 10 and 50 of them used javascript" wouldn't harm anything. They could even add a random error to the statistics...
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  I often do not have a problem with the information telemetry collects: I take issue with the entitlement to it a new breed of awful app developers have. They think they have the right to use my device for information collection without my permission. If Firefox occasionally showed me a report on some metrics it collected and asked me if I was okay sending it to Mozilla, I'd probably be fine with it. However, the choice to take it without my consent will always be opposed.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    Do they do that? It's been a long time since I installed Firefox, but as far as I can tell there are very visible settings for controlling the telemetry that they collect.
    - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      There are settings, however, they are enabled by default to silently send telemetry, and they also implement new ways of collecting telemetry, with new settings to opt out of it, on an "every few months" basis. So it's a constant battle of monitoring what behavior they're up to and turning it off.
- tjoff 5y ago
  It would be possible to figure this out without any sort of telemetry at all. It really feels like a forced way to try and shoe-horn something good to say about telemetry when it is something everyone that deals with PDFs have known since forever. And if that is the best they have to show for it ...
  - roca 5y ago
    How would you figure this out without telemetry? A Web crawl could tell you how many PDF documents on the Web use forms, but it won't tell you often your users encounter those documents --- many documents aren't on the public Web, and some documents will be encountered far more often than others.
    - blondin 5y ago
      > How would you figure this out without telemetry? the way the world has done it forever... a survey? it is concerning. if Firefox is doing it, they are all doing it. i am not going to be opening PDFs in browsers. this is ridiculous.
      - roca 5y ago
        A survey for this is going to be useless for getting unbiased data.
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        A survey would be heavily biased. Telemetry will have much less bias (there is still some since people who disable telemetry have their usage ignored) With better data you can make improvements that help more actual users instead of just focusing on what vocal minorities think.
    - tjoff 5y ago
      The vast majority of questions like that are quite obvious. Now what you might miss is that in some country where special circumstances led to an unusual high use of a certain feature. But this is not that case. More importantly, even with telemetry. Is the JavaScript adding something or is it solely used for tracking? Is it appreciated by the users? Maybe 80% of input validation is so broken that they only serve to block legitimate input and waste cpu-cycles. More than telemetry you need common sense. It is not apparent how the telemetry influenced this in any way.
arbitrage 5y ago
What I find disturbing is that you are complaining about the included javascript in forms at this late a date. Where have you been for like the last fifteen years?
- rudian 5y ago
  Fifteen years is a long time. I’m sure some HN users weren’t even born yet. Not everyone needs to care about everything all the time. I would complain about JS in PDF too, but I don’t have a voice anyway.
InitialLastName 5y ago
> The telemetry part is more scary. There's a nice big section in the Firefox settings called "Firefox Data Collection and Use" that has some fairly fine-grained options for what data you feed back to Firefox. I have all of mine unchecked, but I could imagine that if I were more community-minded, or if I were interested in actively contributing to FF's development day-to-day (for example running on nightly builds) I would activate those. FWIW, I do explicitly allow telemetry for the applications I buy licenses for and use for my work; it's in my best interest for those programs to be improved as efficiently as possible (and to have my use patterns be part of the corpus used to prioritize those improvements), and it makes it easier for me to report issues.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  Also, unless you dismiss it, there's a clear button to read to read their privacy policy and set telemetry (unless you're using the nightly-weekly builds, in this case they state in no ambiguous terms that you cannot disable it).
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  > that has some fairly fine-grained options for what data you feed back to Firefox I looked into these settings but I can only find 4 checkboxes. Which of the four checkboxes would this telemetry fall under? Is this a study, the result of crash report logging, or is it "data about your interactions with Firefox [..] (such as number of open tabs and windows; number of webpages visited; number and type of installed Firefox Add-ons; and session length) and Firefox features offered by Mozilla or our partners (such as interaction with Firefox search features and search partner referrals)" I know Firefox collects some technical tracking, but there is no up to date overview of what tracking is actually done. Is there a list of parameters tracked like Microsoft published [1] after the outcry about their terrible tracking? The privacy policy is vague and the documentation for developers [2] contains phrases such as "opaque prio-specific payload. Like { a: <base64 string>, b: <base64 string> }" which isn't exactly useful. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-windows-diagnostic-data-events-and-fields-2004 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-wi... [2]: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/telemetry/data/prio-ping.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...
sildur 5y ago
Not only that. If they wanted to add form support they should have read the specs, instead of blindly relying on their (very questionable) telemetry. The fact they had to find via telemetry something that every developer who had interacted with a PDF with forms knew (that they have JS) is very worrying. I'm expecting a long long list of bug reports when they start finding the mountains of corner cases not shown by their "telemetry".

BitwiseFool 5y ago

To this day, I do not understand why it is practically impossible to simply rotate a PDF and save it in its rotated form without downloading some additional PDF application. Edit: On Windows. I envy Preview in MacOS

marcellus23 5y ago
Might want to specify the platform. on macOS that's like 2 clicks in Preview.app.
- rudian 5y ago
  It’s a single key shortcut. The document is then auto saved. Preview.app is king.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Is it actually rotated or does it just remember that that document is supposed to be rotated? In other words if you emailed it to me would it still be rotated when I opened it?
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    Actual PDF rotate. In other news, that's precisely why I'm weary to open PDFs in (edit: recent versions of) macOS because it autosaves, and I need to have a bit-perfect copy of said PDF. I mean, I open it in Firefox or Chrome, and this is just a problem that is specific to my circumstance, but it still bugs me.
    - marcellus23 5y ago
      I think there’s an option in System Preferences to disable auto saving
      - zinekeller 5y ago
        That's if I do own my own Mac, but this is in situations like if I'm stuck in the marketing division and needed to view a file immediately.

InitialLastName 5y ago

Why is it that, a ~decade since MacOS started including forms and markups in their default PDF app (Preview) there still isn't a sane PDF editor for Windows? Chrome and Firefox's PDF viewers don't have editing, Edge has editing and forms but bonkers window management (sometimes PDFs open with Edge but not in an Edge window). Adobe Reader DC still tries to ship with malware, and is license-restricted. What gives?

tpmx 5y ago
Apple did it because they were the underdog 15-20 years ago. Microsoft doesn't give a shit. There's no realistic market opportunity for a small third party to get a sizeable amount of revenue either, with Adobe looming. I kinda miss the early 90s when we actually had competing software "houses" with some financial muscle.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  Wrong answer, at least for a time. Microsoft was actually sued by Adobe over the PDF implementation with Office 2007 (before it was standardised in ISO, that was circa 2008-9 if I remember correctly). That's also the reason that XPS (the weird Microsoft format, not Dell laptops) exists. Nowadays though, I don't really know since Microsoft has successfully overturned that case (probably because of Adobe being Adobe?).
  - tpmx 5y ago
    So, not really the wrong answer for the past 12 years or so, then.
    - not2b 5y ago
      The number of years depends on when the various patents expire. Does anyone know?
- motform 5y ago
  preview.app has been around since NextSTEP, which used display postscript for its windowing engine. Having a first-class pdf reader falls out pretty naturally.

frankjr 5y ago

I'm glad PDF.js' development continues. I completely missed that they have abandoned the plan to move to PDFium (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project).

zinekeller 5y ago
Mozilla developers at the time actually have other plans with the Pepper plugin support: Adobe Flash (since that Chrome's Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) is actually miles better and secure than the Netscape [-era - ed.] Plugin API or NPAPI). They abandoned Mortar when Adobe have announced that it will retire Flash. (Also, PDF.js is now a misnomer: it now mainly uses WebAssembly.)
- muizelaar 5y ago
  It doesn't. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language Files Lines Blank Comment Code -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- JavaScript 355 144428 13069 16759 114600 JSON 12 24385 2 0 24383 CSS 12 3302 407 183 2712 HTML 32 1638 176 230 1232 Markdown 19 733 221 0 512 TypeScript 1 20 4 2 14 CoffeeScript 1 15 2 0 13 YAML 1 4 0 1 3 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total 433 174525 13881 17175 143469 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    I'm referring to the one built-into Firefox, not the HTML version. Even comparing the HTML one, this is misleading: the PDF.js compilation step means that there are WebAssembly code written nominally in JavaScript, namely those that handles font rendering and complex graphics (before pushing into the canvas, which by necessity is done in JS).

fzzzy 5y ago

Remember when Mozilla management promised that they were going to kill pdf.js (why?) and replace it with the chrome pdf viewer, then wasted a few years not pulling it off? Good times.

jfk13 5y ago
Sometimes plans don't work out (and/or circumstances change), and changing them is the sensible thing to do. (I don't know details of this specific case, and whether/why the plans and decisions made sense at any given time.)
zinekeller 5y ago
I'll copy out this comment of mine in response to an analogous question: > Mozilla developers at the time actually have other plans with the Pepper plugin support: Adobe Flash (since that Chrome's Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) is actually miles better and secure than the Netscape [-era - ed.] Plugin API or NPAPI). They abandoned Mortar (the name of the project) when Adobe have announced that it will retire Flash.
denton-scratch 5y ago
Mozilla management have never been up to the job; clearly their pay needs to grow drastically, to attract better talent. /s
- fzzzy 5y ago
  heheheheheheh

alacritas0 5y ago

It's impressive how slowly progress has been made on the firefox pdf viewer. They can't print out pages which aren't blurry from the viewer even though they've had 8 years notice: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=811002 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=811002

muizelaar 5y ago
That bug is closed. What PDF and platform do you see blurriness on?
- SigmundA 5y ago
  https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/2750 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/2750 It's because pdf.js does not print vector and instead is just printing canvas bitmaps. If they ever get the SVG backend working its will finally have good print quality without trying to get OOM doing measly 300 dpi canvas.

fguerraz 5y ago

I wonder when Mozilla is going to start to include ads in their pdf renderer. I mean it wouldn't really be "ads", more like suggested extra pages provided by trusted partners...

function_seven 5y ago
They could really add value by using AI to detect certain PDF forms. If the form you're filling appears to be a tax return, then a Helpful Message from a Trusted Partner would appear ("TurboTax users average $300 larger refunds"). Residential mortgage application? "Shop Rates and Save"

emilsedgh 5y ago

PDFJS is fantastic. But PDFJS folks, how can you do such a subpar job at documentation? There is really no documentation available on pdfjs. Or a proper changelog. Like in this article they talk about JS execution in pdfjs. And how they have a solution called quickjs. _no_ documentation whatsoever about how to use it. This has been their documentation for years: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/api/ https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/api/ Had I created something as complex and magnificent as pdfjs I would've documented _the hell_ out of it. I get that pdfjs usage in normal web is not their priority and what they care about is the Firefox pdf viewer but I'm sure they would've had a much better contribution rate had they done better api docs.

saagarjha 5y ago
Yeah, it’s a strange choice considering they ask people to not use their viewer unmodified…
gervwyk 5y ago
Shameless plug. I recently wrote an article for Lowdefy (co-founder here) for using pdfMake with Lowdefy to generate pdfs. Works really great and easy, perhaps the next step is to add a pdf render block using pdfJs. See the article: https://docs.lowdefy.com/generate-pdf-document-from-data https://docs.lowdefy.com/generate-pdf-document-from-data (edit: confused pdfJs for jsPdf)
- gervwyk 5y ago
  Sorry I confused pdfJs for jsPdf. Perhaps the next step is to build a Lowdefy block that uses pdfJs to render pdfs :)
rectang 5y ago
I recently had to implement a custom PDF viewer using PDF.js. It took a loooong time, because PDF.js is so confusing to work with. We went way over what we thought was a conservative time estimate. :( It's not just a matter of documentation, but API design. Beyond the bare minimum functionality, you'll need bits and pieces of semi-public API. For example, if you want to use the "text layer" (for selectable text) you'll need a CSS file which is inside the `web/` directory. But what's in `web/` is incomplete and not officially supported.

c0nsumer 5y ago

I wish the Firefox PDF viewer performed a little better... Lately as I've been working on mapping projects and want to view large PDFs I've found many which need to be saved and opened in Preview.app instead of the browser. This is a great example of a map which views horribly in Firefox (try zooming in) but works great in Preview.app: https://www.bia.gov/sites/bia.gov/files/assets/public/webteam/pdf/idc1-028635.pdf https://www.bia.gov/sites/bia.gov/files/assets/public/webtea...

muizelaar 5y ago
I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1736108 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1736108 for that case.
- c0nsumer 5y ago
  Well, thank you!

xvilka 5y ago

PDF Forms are tricky. Though I would prefer if more attention given to the native PDF libraries like poppler[1] that drive Okular, Evince, Zathura, and many other PDF viewers. There are long-standing bugs[2] with PDF Forms support, especially with non-English languages[3][4][5]. [1] https://poppler.freedesktop.org/ https://poppler.freedesktop.org/ [2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?label_name%5B%5D=forms https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues?labe... [3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/463 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/463 [4] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/230 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/230 [5] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/364 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/364

jillesvangurp 5y ago

It seems to me that with WASM, it's easier than ever to have good cross platform and performant implementations for dealing with pdf and many other file formats in a sane way. There is a lot of open source software out there that probably already can be compiled to run in a browser with WASM.

denton-scratch 5y ago

I have a learned aversion to PDF features such as forms. It's partly because HTML already has pretty good forms; and partly because of the long history of gross PDF security failures by Adobe. I think a PDF viewer (I prefer "reader", because that's what Adobe called their free product) is for viewing PDFs. The point of PDF, to my mind, was that you got a much higher level of control of typography and design than you could get with HTML. So designers and marketers liked it. I have never bought into interactive PDFs.