Firefox’s latest update adds a nifty PDF editing feature | Hacker News Reader

Firefox’s latest update adds a nifty PDF editing feature

pcworld.com

41 pointsMilnerRoute13 comments

Good, because I can't edit PDFs anywhere else.

I swear I used to be able to do this in Adobe Acrobat without a paid subscription. Now I can't. And I don't mean editing, I mean merely filling them out, too.

You know those PDFs you get everywhere, including government agencies, that are fillable? No chance anymore unless you're paying Adobe.

Google Drive won't do it, Acrobat demands tribute, Evince won't do it. (Evince is my preferred PDF app on Windows 10, primarily because it's so lightweight and mostly-compatible.)

I suppose, if I am facing the need to fill another PDF soon, I could download Firefox and see how that goes. I don't really need/use Firefox day to day anyway. I try to keep my installed app base small.

Have you tried the pdf viewer of your browser (Chrome-based)? That might work. I’m usually using Apple’s Preview app (which has very solid PDF editing features), but I suspect that you’re not on macOS.

Evince for PDF editing works fine for me, on Ubuntu. Are you sure you have a complete and recent build?

Well, I was going to test editing right now on a fillable government form, but eVince insists that it is password protected, and opening it in Adobe Acrobat proves that it is indeed not password protected.

So I must have some sort of malware edition of eVince.

  Nuking from orbit now: [==                       ]

Confirmed; Evince 2.32.0 for Windows is wholly incapable of filling forms or editing PDFs. Its confusion about password-protection seems confined to certain individual documents. I can view 'em fine, I can't change 'em.

I remember my dad asked for help rotating a PDF from portrait to landscape on his Windows PC and realizing he'd have to buy software to do it. It takes one click on MacOS. It made me determined not to get adobe out of principle and I did end up finding https://smallpdf.com/ by a Swiss team. The free tier has a lot of features that adobe paywalls like editing and signature requests and it loads fast.

Why is the date on this article 5-months ago? (OCT 18, 2022) Is this really a new feature?

A quick verification check says the current version is 111 while the article is talking about 106.

111 shows an ad for the feature on launch, and my computer just updated to it today.

Inkscape 1.2 can import and edit multiple pdf pages

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33262057 (Firefox 106 brings PDF annotations to browser, 4 months ago, 28 points, 11 comments)

Does that mean I could open local PDFs on mobile again? Or I can only transiently markup a document I just downloaded?

Yes.

Though to be clear you can do this on any browser now, since PDF.js is the tool which gained this functionality, and is openly distributed and widely used.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com