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I'm curious to know why you built this when the Mozilla PDF viewer exists: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js Not criticizing

I'm curious to know why you built this when the Mozilla PDF viewer exists: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js Not criticizing because there's lots of reason to build things that exist, just curious.

majkinetor 1y ago
Cursory looks tells me that there are some different features, like annotation comments.
bobsingor 1y ago
The main goal was to make a PDF viewer that is easy for developers to integrate into their websites with minimal setup, while PDF.js can be harder to customize and extend for certain use cases
- wg0 1y ago
  Out of curiosity: - Is it written from scratch? - Did you have prior experience with PDF format and rendering? Stupid question: Do you feel LLMs can do that kind of work beyond typical SPAs with forms and CRUD?
vrzucchini 1y ago
For app integration, the annotations, shapes, and comments are a game changer. Once you need real PDF markup tools, your options are either building them yourself or using a subscription-based PDF editor - neither comes cheap. I know teams that integrated Apryse, and the costs just to support basic PDF editing are eye-watering.
- bobsingor 1y ago
  Yes, those commercial PDF SDKs charge crazy prices! Time to change that.
mattigames 1y ago
402 open issues, mother of God, it's a glimpse of the massive effort that is handling PDFs and all it's features.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  This may be hairsplitting, but emphasis on the handling word in that sentence. I would bet it's not so much the feature gap it's that the specification is very, very YOLO. And when any number of byte sequences happened to render as a PDF[1], then such a situation leads to a very, very diverse set of inputs that coincidentally work on some systems leading to "works on my machine" type outcomes. When your project is in the business of rendering things which happen to work in ${other system} it leads to a lot of very angry users 1: it's like the million monkeys with a million typewriters decided to go work at Adobe and they really have heard great things about mixed text and binary file formats because they are outstanding RCE and stack smashing opportunities
- zdragnar 1y ago
  On the one hand, a lot of those are feature requests, not necessarily bugs. They also have more users, so they catch more edge case bugs like "Hebrew is rendered backwards" and so on. On the other hand, PDF.js has been around for more than a decade. As it is a core component of Firefox, and viewing PDFs is an important part of name business applications, you'd think they'd have not nearly so many issues. I know PostScript and PDFs are a nightmare, but no small part of me feels like this is yet another case of Mozilla underfunding development.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    > they catch more edge case bugs like "Hebrew is rendered backwards" and so on. I love when my core use case, show stopping bug is considered an edge case. )) In any case, there are more native speakers of right-to-left languages then there are native English speakers.
    - catoc 1y ago
      Specifically a right edge case
datap121590 1y ago
Go to your link on an iPad or iPhone and open their demo document. The tap Print Preview - it only appears to work on desktop devices.
- input_sh 1y ago
  Why would you blame Mozilla for that instead of Safari? Works just fine on Android using both Chrome and Firefox.

majkinetor 1y ago

Cursory looks tells me that there are some different features, like annotation comments.

bobsingor 1y ago

The main goal was to make a PDF viewer that is easy for developers to integrate into their websites with minimal setup, while PDF.js can be harder to customize and extend for certain use cases

wg0 1y ago
Out of curiosity: - Is it written from scratch? - Did you have prior experience with PDF format and rendering? Stupid question: Do you feel LLMs can do that kind of work beyond typical SPAs with forms and CRUD?

vrzucchini 1y ago

For app integration, the annotations, shapes, and comments are a game changer. Once you need real PDF markup tools, your options are either building them yourself or using a subscription-based PDF editor - neither comes cheap. I know teams that integrated Apryse, and the costs just to support basic PDF editing are eye-watering.

bobsingor 1y ago
Yes, those commercial PDF SDKs charge crazy prices! Time to change that.

mattigames 1y ago

402 open issues, mother of God, it's a glimpse of the massive effort that is handling PDFs and all it's features.

mdaniel 1y ago
This may be hairsplitting, but emphasis on the handling word in that sentence. I would bet it's not so much the feature gap it's that the specification is very, very YOLO. And when any number of byte sequences happened to render as a PDF[1], then such a situation leads to a very, very diverse set of inputs that coincidentally work on some systems leading to "works on my machine" type outcomes. When your project is in the business of rendering things which happen to work in ${other system} it leads to a lot of very angry users 1: it's like the million monkeys with a million typewriters decided to go work at Adobe and they really have heard great things about mixed text and binary file formats because they are outstanding RCE and stack smashing opportunities
zdragnar 1y ago
On the one hand, a lot of those are feature requests, not necessarily bugs. They also have more users, so they catch more edge case bugs like "Hebrew is rendered backwards" and so on. On the other hand, PDF.js has been around for more than a decade. As it is a core component of Firefox, and viewing PDFs is an important part of name business applications, you'd think they'd have not nearly so many issues. I know PostScript and PDFs are a nightmare, but no small part of me feels like this is yet another case of Mozilla underfunding development.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  > they catch more edge case bugs like "Hebrew is rendered backwards" and so on. I love when my core use case, show stopping bug is considered an edge case. )) In any case, there are more native speakers of right-to-left languages then there are native English speakers.
  - catoc 1y ago
    Specifically a right edge case

datap121590 1y ago

Go to your link on an iPad or iPhone and open their demo document. The tap Print Preview - it only appears to work on desktop devices.

input_sh 1y ago
Why would you blame Mozilla for that instead of Safari? Works just fine on Android using both Chrome and Firefox.