Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Firefox can add text/drawings to PDFs (mozilla.org)
61 points by jolfosh 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments



Neat! Increased browser PDF support, and further minimizing my need to ever need to use predatory Adobe products for niche use cases, is always very welcomed.


Exactly! You would think a free tool for such a simple purpose would be easier to find online. Glad to see Firefox raising the bar


Have you checked https://tinywow.com/tools/pdf ? They seem to cover almost everything you'd like to do.

There is also https://simplepdf.eu


The only thing i miss from macOS is preview's ability to copy/cut/paste PDF pages.

It is way too convoluted anywhere else.


macOS preview is a beast, haven't seen anything come close to it yet.


I recently discovered it and I love it, one place for you to fill forms and soft-sign them in one clean swoop. Works with interactive forms as well as flat ones(uses typewriter mode). Additionally, it allows you to free-hand scratch the document, to indicate to colleagues/subordinates what you wished removed. This should be handy for doctors and other technical people on the go.. a sort of digital pad right in the ubiquitous browser. Keep them features coming mozilla, I'm also loving their containerized tab add-on


That's great!

Does it add the text as comments, or as "actual PDF content"? Comments are fine in most cases (and always when printing the document for archaic ceremonies involving ink and paper signatures), but I've had a few cases where I'd wished there was an easy way to add "actual text" in Apple's Preview.app.


In Preview.app, I wonder if doing a Print to PDF step would normalize those comments into “actual text”


That's what I do too, but sometimes I forget it, and then I suffer the consequences e.g. when using e-signing (which sometimes covers comments/annotations, but not always, but in any case creates a very high possibility of random PDF viewers breaking the signature in my experience).


PDF.js is great. I used to even use a chrome extension to use it in chrome back when I needed to use it. I think that extension hasn't been kept up to date though.

I'm no longer concerned about exploits from sketchy PDFs.


Just wish it had high quality vector based printing, sad they dropped thier SVG backend.


> Firefox can add text/drawings to PDFs

But it cannot print a web page. And the pdf viewer is a usability disaster.


This isn't new? I've been able to add text and draw on PDFs with FF for a long time.


I hope it has js api to also do it programmatically


If it’s pdf.js, it is all an API. Poorly documented one but an API.


Finally!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: