Improve PDF editing functionality

[ADGrimes]

It would be great to be able to match the built in PDF editing tools that Microsoft Edge has, specifically the highlighting and drawing tools. This is one of the reasons I can't use Firefox for working with PDFs.

[pg_78]

This would be a really worthy way to apply Mozilla's principles for concrete good.  Currently it's much too difficult to edit a PDF without using a tool that's either paid-for on the one hand, or privacy-unfriendly on the other (the various online free-as-in-beer tools).

[rb]

Please bring the Highlighting feature for PDF. This is already present in Microsoft Edge and it is super useful and handy feature.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[ansiklopedici]

Relevant idea:

• Highlighting Tool or PDF 

[ADGrimes]

Please do vote on my idea for this: Improve PDF editing functionality  

[Jon]

@ADGrimes , @ansiklopedici , & @rb thanks for the heads up! We have merged the threads and votes together to keep the conversation focused in one space. The idea has also been shared with our internal teams, so it is on their radar.

[FireFox]

Totally agree.

We can then ditch Adobe and switch to Firefox for all PDF needs.

[FirefoxUser1]

Ability to edit PDFs in #Firefox similar to MS Edge browser.

Ability to sign and encrypt PDFs would be great too, talk about disruption. lol

[Jon]

Hey all,

Here with an exciting update…

Your idea has received a great deal of votes (kudos) and support here in the Mozilla Connect community, so we are upgrading the status to “Trending idea.” This means it’s now one step closer to reaching our internal teams for review—learn more about The Idea Journey.

Please keep the conversation going and stay tuned for updates 😃

-The Community Team

[Vendetta]

Well, I'm a researcher and in my current workflow I read/skim a lot of papers (pdfs through links) and never really know if I will be using this specific paper in the end, but if there's something useful I store the document in my sources (a .bib file in latex for example) as a link and will probably open it through that link later on; all in my browser. Having gathered a lot, I usually forget what was so important.

I figured it would be nice to highlight online documents; thus with no need to physically store them on my device, as that would require me to first lookup the name of that pdf, then search in some local folder (if I even had annotated it...), and opening it with my default pdf reader that doesn't have tabbing features, making multiple opened pdfs cumbersome. However, other times when not doing research, I may only have 1 pdf opened, and would like to do so with my default reader for its dark theming functionality for example.

So I searched if some extension would store the highlights per site for me. And yes, there is exactly an extension that does that, Yamas (or Textmarker). Yamas for example keeps changes even after reloading the page by storing them in bookmarks. However it's not able to anymore for pdfs, neither is Textmarker.

So in case it's not too different from this topic, I would suggest creating an API to make it possible for such highlighting extensions out there that already exist to work on pdfs again; or support annotating pdfs directly through Firefox, but I see my workflow is probably not as common, so it will probably result in an Edge like implementation. Hence the suggestion for allowing extensions some functionality as that work has already been made and is already available; all it needs is some access that Firefox considers safe to deploy. What about an option to "allow this extension to inject js into pdf"?

If I can reenable extensions accessing my pdfs again through some about:config, I would love to hear!

[Anonymous]

A webbrowser is not a "PDF viewer/editor" and should not be bloated with the addional functionality.

People might like the idea because it would fit their workflow but convenience should not superseed purpose/design or security aspects.

I am fine with it being an optional protocol, which extension can handle/render ... but not everyone wants or needs their pdf reader to be integrated into the browser.

It seems that  posts like these are opened for each content-type found on the internet. (EPUB, ISO, Torrent, ...) 

I really hope mozilla will soon extend the protocol and content-type handling functionality for the web-exentsion API. Than these posts ... should vanish by themself.

[filloBuccia]

A collaboration with OnlyOffice, that already has a pdf modifier tool, would be great. They're both privacy open source focused company.

[Sisebuto_]

Additionally, if a simple presenter view would be added to that reader, for example to be used with Beamer presentations, witch included a Clock/Timer/Countdown and slide splitting to be used in the way Pacien (GitHub https://github.com/pacien/beamer-viewer) did, would be absolutely great and different. I love the reveal.js speaker's interface design too.

[marco]

Thank you everyone for your idea and suggestions, we are starting to build some basic PDF editing features. Initially we will support inserting text, with color and font size selection, and drawing, with color and line thickness selection.

The feature is currently available in Nightly behind a pref, you can test it out if you want, but do take into account that the UI/UX will likely change.

You can follow along the development in the meta bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1774350 and in the GitHub project at https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/projects/9.

[Jon]

Hi all,

Great news!

This idea was shared with our internal teams, and we're happy to report that it's "In development."

Please refer to @marco's post for more info and stay tuned for updates 😃

-The Community Team

[Jon]

Hi all,

Great news!

This idea was shared with our internal teams, and we're happy to report that it's "In development."

Please refer to @marco's post for more info and stay tuned for updates 😃

-The Community Team

[Jon]

Hi all,

Great news!

This idea was shared with our internal teams, and we're happy to report that it's "In development."

Please refer to @marco's post for more info and stay tuned for updates 😃

-The Community Team

[Jon]

Hi all,

Great news!

This idea was shared with our internal teams, and we're happy to report that it's "In development."

Please refer to @marco's post for more info and stay tuned for updates 😃

-The Community Team