Mozilla wants Firefox to render PDFs with HTML5, JavaScript

[Airbot]

Currently, browsers rely on plug-ins to display PDF files, like Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader. This may soon change, as there is a Firefox project in the works to build a PDF reader in HTML5 and JavaScript.

A PDF reader needs to be fast at operations like rendering text, drawing lines, blitting images – all the things that browsers need to be fast at too. In other words, browser are already optimized for the task at hand, they just need to be told how to do it.

The project is called pdf.js and is available for everyone to see on GitHub. It has been in development for about a month now, but there's already an early demo available at people.mozilla.org/~gal/test.html that you can check out for yourself. There are still glitches and rendering artifacts, but it's definitely a good start, especially for four weeks of work.

The first order of business is to get pdf.js to render PDFs "natively" in Firefox itself, and the team believes it can get the most commonly used PDF features working in less than three months. The group will start by making a Firefox extension available to interested users that enables inline PDF rendering using pdf.js.

more..

 

[Win7User512]

Demo isn't working for me...guess they need to work on that one.

 

[Dwarf]

Interesting. I'll be keeping an eye open on this. Whether we will also need to install either Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader (or some other equivalent program) to view files already saved on the HDD remains to be seen, as it will depend on the scope of this proposed new add-on. In other words, will it decode locally stored files as well as those that are on-line?

 

[Airbot]

When Win 8 comes around, it'll have it's own built in pdf software so you could use that instead of third party if you made the move to 8 when it comes around. That's still a year away though.

 

[logicearth]

When Win 8 comes around, it'll have it's own built in pdf software....

Will it? I can just see Adobe having a fit unless its just a bundle of Adobe Reader...?

 

[Phone Man]

When Win 8 comes around, it'll have it's own built in pdf software....

Will it? I can just see Adobe having a fit unless its just a bundle of Adobe Reader...?

If it uses Adobe I will pass unless it can be disabled.

Jim

 

[Airbot]

When Win 8 comes around, it'll have it's own built in pdf software....

Will it? I can just see Adobe having a fit unless its just a bundle of Adobe Reader...?

Yeah, called Modern Reader.

First Windows 8 screenshots of "Metro UI" featured in IE and Modern PDF Reader
Windows 8 - 7850 Leaked - Page 10
Within Windows | Windows 8 Secrets: Modern Reader

When Win 8 comes around, it'll have it's own built in pdf software....

Will it? I can just see Adobe having a fit unless its just a bundle of Adobe Reader...?

If it uses Adobe I will pass unless it can be disabled.

Jim

It's not Adobe. Integrated/native in Win 8.

 

[Win7User512]

Interesting. I'll be keeping an eye open on this. Whether we will also need to install either Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader (or some other equivalent program) to view files already saved on the HDD remains to be seen, as it will depend on the scope of this proposed new add-on. In other words, will it decode locally stored files as well as those that are on-line?

It has a "browse" button to open files. Like on a hard drive.

 

[kado897]

Chrome already has its own PDF reader built in. Works well and is much faster.

 

[Schroff87]

Chrome already has its own PDF reader built in. Works well and is much faster.

Didn't know that one! Google really made it to work out of the box with minimum fuss then! I still love my addons for FF Hope to see this feature implemented soon in an Aurora build.

 

[Buddahfan]

I would be happy if it could convert the *.pdf file to *.txt file. Making annotations and editing will probably be beyond its scope of ability at least initially.

 

[kado897]

Chrome already has its own PDF reader built in. Works well and is much faster.

Didn't know that one! Google really made it to work out of the box with minimum fuss then! I still love my addons for FF Hope to see this feature implemented soon in an Aurora build.

Yes they have had it for some time now and as I said works well. You can also open PDF files on you HDD see attachment.

 

[smarteyeball]

I would be happy if it could convert the *.pdf file to *.txt file. Making annotations and editing will probably be beyond its scope of ability at least initially.

Yep.

PDF readers are a dime a dozen - but free and easy editable .PDFs would be much more useful.

 

[Airbot]

Mozilla's pdf.js version 0.2: sample PDF now renders in HTML5, JavaScript

Mozilla's pdf.js project has reached its first milestone: a "pixel-perfect rendering" of a sample PDF (a paper on Mozilla's Tracemonkey JavaScript engine). Well, perfect in one specific browser and OS combination.
The pdf.js project currently produces different results depending on the browser and OS you are using. If you're running a Firefox nightly on a Windows 7 machine, where the browser can use Direct2D and DirectWrite, the result is perfection (assuming you ignore a bug in DirectWrite's font hinting). The paper isn't rendered so well on other platforms, nor on older versions Firefox. It's even worse in other browsers.
Nevertheless, some serious progress has been made, considering that the sample file contains formatted text, graphics, tables, and graphical diagrams. As a result, the project has been bumped to version 0.2.

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[Phone Man]

Here is a nice demo. After it is open move your cursor to the left margin and the page list will appear.

andreasgal/pdf.js @ GitHub

This demo has a toolbar. I used the Open File to open some other PDF's on my system but its not ready for prime time. Parts of the other PDF's rendered but had lots of blank pages.




Jim

 

[Buddahfan]

Interesting. I'll be keeping an eye open on this. Whether we will also need to install either Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader (or some other equivalent program) to view files already saved on the HDD remains to be seen, as it will depend on the scope of this proposed new add-on. In other words, will it decode locally stored files as well as those that are on-line?

Doesn't seem like it, at least not initially. However, ISTM that if the pdf file on the Net shows up in a Firefox browser tab then you might be able to save that tab with the pdf file as a Firefox page which could later be opened and read by Firefox. This can be done now with saved URLs. However, I have my doubts as to whether these saved Firefox pages could be read by Adobe, Foxit, Nitro etc. unless they modify their programs to do so. JMO

PDF.js/Planning/1.0

Objectives

The focus of PDF.js 1.0 is to build an extension able to render a PDF using only JavaScript and HTML features accessible through a webpage.
If some features that can be useful for the web in general are missing on the platform side they can be added to the platform.

 

[mjm6783]

I would be happy if it could convert the *.pdf file to *.txt file. Making annotations and editing will probably be beyond its scope of ability at least initially.

Are you referring to OCR functions like the one in Acrobat that tries to convert the visual image into functional text? Because I would gladly switch to any browser that implemented that feature. Do we know yet if this Win8 "Modern Reader" will have something similar as well?