topic Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback! in Discussions

PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 08:55:49 GMT

Hello!

I'm Romain from the product team. We just launched Firefox 106 that brings annotation capabilities to our pdf reader, built inside Firefox.

When pdf forms are not fill-able or when some quick notes are needed on pdf documents, you can now directly add text or draw on pdf documents before saving or sharing them.

How? See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-pdf-files-firefox-or-choose-another-viewer#w_annotate-pdf-files

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the feature to help us steer what's next for annotations on pdf documents.

Thanks for your participation!

Neue PDF Tools

Chris23tr — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 13:46:56 GMT

With the PDF tools, the character is freehand, so it would have been nice if you could make a nice straight line, and making is not that easy either, you have to find the right combination of opacity and color.

Bei den PDF Tools ist das Zeichen freihand, da wäre es noch schön gewesen wen man ein schönen geraden Strich machen kann, und makern ist auch nicht so einfach da muss man die richtige kombination aus Deckkraft und Farbe finden.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Jon — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 12:50:02 GMT

We’re excited to connect with you all about PDF Annotations and work together to make the feature even better!

A quick reminder…

When participating in this discussion, please remember to:

-Follow the Community Guidelines

Anything that violates the guidelines will be flagged and removed.

-Stay on topic

Let’s keep this thread focused and productive. If you have additional product feedback or ideas unrelated to the discussion topic, create a new post.

Thanks so much and looking forward to hearing your feedback 🙌

-The Community Team

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Jengo — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 14:18:28 GMT

Please add a highlighter tool (like in Microsoft Edge).

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

ansiklopedici — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 17:05:22 GMT

Hello,

Thank you very much for the feature.

My suggestions:

Add the save button.
Add default colour palette. (black, blue, red etc.)
Add the eraser feature.

Re: Neue PDF Tools

Chris23tr — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 18:30:11 GMT

also a colored marker with which you can highlight test sites

auch ein Farblicher Markter mit dem man Teststellen hervorheben kann

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

hokonch — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 18:03:59 GMT

I don't know whether the bug has been already filed to Bugzilla, I can't use PDF annotations in my language, Japanese.

Click the Text button
Type Japanese in the form
Save & Reopen
You will see mojibake

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 01:23:33 GMT

Hi there,

A couple things I'd love to see:

A selector tool to select and open options to delete, edit, resize, etc for any annotation past or current on PDF. This would be a big help to find these tools instead of first selecting then right clicking on an annotation.
The ability to reshape typed annotations. There already is the slider for resizing text but this can push the text off the visible page. Maybe some form of mini adjustable boxes around the text would be useful.

Thanks!

Re: Neue PDF Tools

rtestard — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 08:16:57 GMT

Thanks @Chris23tr , do i get this right that you'd rather have a preset list of colors and opacity rather than The color picker the way it is currently?

Drawing straight lines and the a text highlight tool make sense to me. I feel like a text highlight tool will be more valuable overall.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 08:18:11 GMT

Thanks @Jengo

Agreed highlighting text would be a useful feature to add.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 08:26:50 GMT

Thanks @ansiklopedici

Regarding the "save" button - how is this different from the "Download" button? I'm curious if the UI is not obvious enough or if you expect something different from the feature.

Default color palette - that makes sense - it seems like others are also bringing this up. It's always hard to find the right compromise between useability and capabilities but I concur here that a list of preset color could make the feature easier to use without restricting capabilities. Perhaps we can find a way to expose preset colors with a "more" option.

Eraser feature: you can currently select annotations and delete them with your keyboard. I'm curious if you discovered or you rather expect a feature allowing to erase areas of an annotation.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 08:48:16 GMT

Thanks @Anonymous

I agree that making edit options available through a menu rather than having to rely on keyboard and mouse input could make it more accessible. I'll follow-up with UX on this.

I'm not sure I get your ^pint regarding text resizing. Is this about having a set of preset sizes as opposed to a slider?

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 08:41:06 GMT

Thanks @hokonch , I believe this is a new bug, let's track this on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1797040

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

bhandscomb — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 10:42:57 GMT

Not 100% related to annotation, but PDF related... From 106.0 release notes...

"Setting Firefox as your default browser now also makes it the default PDF application on Windows systems."

That is NOT COOL in my opinion... If people ask Firefox to be default web browser it shouldn't be assumed people want it to be their PDF application - that was NOT what the user requested. I have seen other browsers do this and cause help desk reports in a corporate environment when people complain their documents are opening up in browsers (think Chrome is another offender) rather than say Acrobat...

Please consider reverting this disruptive behaviour before next LTS... No web browser should be messing with PDF file associations unless the user asks for that - it should be linked to being asked to be made the default web browser...

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 11:53:11 GMT

FYI this only happens if the current default pdf handler is another browser. Typically new Firefox installs will have Edge set to default on Windows for both HTTP/HTTPs, .hmt/.html and .pdf. If you move to Firefox as your default browser we assume that, if another browser is your default handler for pdf then you'll want to now use your new default for this.

For instance if you have Adobe as default pdf handler then you'll retain it after setting Firefox as your default browser.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 15:18:46 GMT

@rtestard Thanks for responding!

For the text resizing bit, I was thinking of the text annotations to have adjustable boxes on all the corners. (Ie: Similar to how MS Word text boxes have adjustable walls on the box.)

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 15:54:20 GMT

I see thanks. And agreed that it makes sense as a potential improvement.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Vanjaman — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 18:10:28 GMT

I like the new PDF drawer but see two small improvements

The size slider has no frame of reference, so to find a desired size you have to experiment. Perhaps you could show a circle that shows the size of the line while changing size.
I find it unnecessary to klick OK in the colour picker. I would rather have the ability to klick outside the colour picker window to close it and set the colour and start drawing with it. Perhaps still keep the OK and Cancel buttons to allow to cancel the colour change and go back to the previous colour.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

vdlinh2010 — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 02:27:15 GMT

Hi Romain, I would like to have 2 small improvement for PDF Viewer on Firefox:

I would like to be able to click Middle mouse to open a bookmark in the new tab (currently unable to do so).
When I open a bookmark in the new tab (by click right mouse and Open in new tab), the tab do not load automatically, while it should be done automatically.

My Firefox version is 106.0.1 (64-bit). Please make these improvement if possible.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

ansiklopedici — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 07:24:54 GMT

Thank you @rtestard

The save button "simply" serves to update the document. When we download it requires more steps. And the 'overwriting' of the document with the download button is not obvious enough.

When you delete a drawing by clicking Cut, the entire drawing is deleted. With the eraser, you can only erase part of the drawing.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 07:59:48 GMT

Hi @vdlinh2010 These issues are not pdf annotation specific, thanks for raising them on another discussion.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:02:20 GMT

Thanks for that feedback @Vanjaman

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Jon — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 14:42:24 GMT

Thanks @Jengo!

Feel free to vote for a highlighter tool here:

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

chengoldberg — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 08:02:56 GMT

Hebrew and RTL support is needed will be appreciated

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

dyme — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 10:12:21 GMT

PDF annotations with text in cyrillic display weird symbols after saving and opening again (in attached screenshot the first line is latin, the second is supposed to be cyrillic)

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 18:08:22 GMT

Since the pdf module gets more and more functionality ... for those people who rather use external applications is there any chance, that the pdf.js module might move into the direction of becoming an uninstallable addon in the future?

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

sandraghassen — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 19:22:46 GMT

I have been using Firefox since its inception, I can just tell you that this is 'phenomenal'...

Sandraghassen - MozRep from Maurititus

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

randomofamber — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 12:38:53 GMT

Hello,

I can write annotation with my national letters but when print document, they wanished...

Character sets I use: Windows-1250, ISO-8859-2, UTF-8

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Jon — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 20:10:02 GMT

Happy to hear @sandraghassen! Are there any other capabilities you'd like to see added as we look ahead at what's next for pdf annotations?

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

danbeing — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 22:36:16 GMT

Yours was the only entry related to the issue of "print to pdf broken in 107" so perhaps you could forward this to whoever in the product team would be appropriate. I have a life-flow of printing to pdf and have been doing so in FireFox as my preferred browser. I updated FireFox twice in short succession (I usually update as soon as the prompt appears but I had a lot of sites open and didn't want to risk a gaff, so I went a couple of weeks). I'm now using 107 and can no longer print to pdf. I'm having to return to Safari for as long as this remains the case. I had some disputes with merchants and couldn't create pdf's of our email correspondence, or receipts, nor Newspaper articles. Thanks for what attention you can give this.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 08:50:47 GMT

Thanks for the report, this should now be fixed on nightly and make its way to relese

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 08:52:11 GMT

Thanks for the report, this should now be fixed on nightly and make its way to release

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 08:56:41 GMT

Can you please describe your exact flow and the OS you are on?

If I am on a web page, select to print it and then select "Save to PDF" as a destination it will save teh web page as a pdf.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Mchiorean — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 13:24:42 GMT

Testing Japanese "ﾊｷｸﾊｸ".

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

danbeing — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 21:00:18 GMT

I follow a link to a web page, just now <https://www.thehastingscenter.org/pediatric-gender-care-the-cure-for-politicized-medicine-is-evidence-based-medicine/>;, I hit Print. Up pops the familiar dialogue, which I find I now have to reset to "Save to PDF" each time—as I almost never print hardcopy, this previously always remained at "Save to PDF"—I hit Save and get Nada. I hit cancel. Thanks. Dan [Apparently I can't respond directly to emails I received from this site[?]]

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

danbeing — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 21:01:44 GMT

I am in macOS Catalina 10.15.7 and Firefox 107.0

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

fastdixie — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 16:54:07 GMT

Where did PDF Presentation mode go? We need it back in the toolbar, we use it weekly as we've migrated everything to Firefox and use presentation mode for group interaction.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

sfink — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 17:21:06 GMT

One of my more common uses of PDF annotation is to sign documents. I would like this to be easier. Right now it's a matter of zooming in, picking the right pen thickness, then drawing my signature with the mouse.

One alternative approach would be to allow me to import a drawing to paste onto the PDF.

But my use case is really "I want to sign a PDF" (sometimes with my full signature, sometimes with initials). Anything that makes it easier would be great.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

zaidi — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 04:56:13 GMT

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Selinth — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 03:55:48 GMT

So I'm not sure this is the right place to mention this but I have some major issues with 'fillable' pdf's on firefox. For instance, every fillable D&D character sheet works fine in edge, and the math works just fine, but in firefox, where having +5 dex should give me +5 to my AC (the math is basically ability mod (5) plus base AC(10)) but instead of 15 AC I end up with 5,010. Weird stuff. Would love to see that sort of issue ironed out so I can stop having to open Microsoft Edge for D&D night

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rtestard — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 09:03:56 GMT

Hi @Selinth can you please share a pdf document link and clarify which field specifically gets wrongly calculated?

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Selinth — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 09:10:24 GMT

It was from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/starfinder_rpg/comments/pqvc25/interactive_character_sheets_updated_links/ (the starfindersupercharactersheet.pdf) Basically if you go in and up your Dexterity ability score you'll see the modifier is calculated correctly (so for 20 dex the mod is +5) but it puts your EAC and KAC (energy and kinetic armor class respectively) to crazy numbers like 5010 and 150, when they both should be 15.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

calixte — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 09:15:13 GMT

It's the first entry in the double chevrons menu:

or you can use the keyboard shortcut: ctrl+alt+p.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

calixte — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 13:10:31 GMT

I filed a bug about it:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1802888

Don't hesitate to file a bug when you think something is wrong.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

jhteach — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 11:15:37 GMT

Hi!

I am very appreciative of this update to Firefox's built-in PDF reader, particularly as it borrows from Firefox's very user-friendly UI.

I am a high school teacher and use PDFs almost daily. Without access to professional PDF editing software, I largely rely on free PDF editors. There are some features that I would love to see implemented:

1) An "eyedropper" as part of color selection. This would help quickly match colours of fonts and background colors from the PDF.

2) A shape tool. It makes it quick and easy for me to cover up parts of the PDF that I don't want seen (even better when combined with the "eyedropper" to match background color).

3) "Save to PDF" ordered pages. To delete pages of a PDF, I "Print > Save to PDF > Custom Pages", and only type the pages I want to keep. Within this, if I type custom pages "2, 1" the document remains in order. If possible, it would be great if the order typed could be kept, allowing you to rearrange pages on a PDF in a newly saved document.

4) Merge PDF tool. To combine two or more PDFs together.

Many thanks and kind regards.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

sterafix — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 06:50:08 GMT

The only thing missing for me to switch from Adobe Acrobat to the build in PDF editor in Firefox for quickly filling documents is a "safe signature" feature. I hate to draw ugly signatures with the touchpad of my laptop. Instead, I would love to be able to create a beautiful signature once (e.g., on my iPad), and then be able to safe it and in future just add it to documents like a stamp.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

GutachterKaplan — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 10:26:17 GMT

Hi,
I love the PDF-annotator. That´s a game changer. With the following feature, it would surely become my standard PDF-viewer:

- possibility to add pictures (.jpg) and scale them, i.e. a signature.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

webistrator — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 17:08:54 GMT

As a viewer it's fine, but when annotating the highlighting and comments are only for personal use -- they cannot be sent with the PDF doc. to others (or at least I could not do it...). For annotation, whether private or public, I still prefer the free Hypothesis.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

j-p_FF — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 10:39:35 GMT

Bonjour Romain. 😉

It's already great to be able to add text and, secondarily, to draw lines freehand.
The way these annotations are implemented is excellent. Congratulations and thanks !
Also, they are perennial= displayed by other .pdf applications.

I'm embarrassed to suggest many additional implementations because I know it's a lot of work.
I'll just point out what I use every day with other software.

For the so-called annotations:
- highlighting;
- underlining;
- strike out text;
- drawing colored rectangles (around pieces of sentences to create titles);
- text as a reducible note ~post-it-like~ (rarely).

Beyond annotations:
- Page manipulation: rotation (possible already but only in display, not perennial), extraction (which can already be done by the "Print" function but without rearrangement), merging; insertion (which would be possible if a merge were feasible);
- Image insertion (including a signature image);
- digital signature;
- encryption;
- OCR;
- file size reduction.

If FF could provide these capabilities, or many of them, it would be super-great !

Currently, I use Okular KDE (excellent on many points) + PDFsam Basic (for page manipulation) + Foxit Reader (for image insertion) + NAPS2 (for OCR).
I have definitively abandoned Adobe applications that pollute, slow down systems, and cost exorbitant prices.

J-P

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

dillon — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 05:13:52 GMT

Suggestion: Keyboard shortcuts to swap to different tools

I think it would greatly increase productivity

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Jon — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 15:06:47 GMT

Thanks @j-p_FF ... this is great feedback!

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Jon — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 15:07:13 GMT

This is an interesting one, thanks! 🙌

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

nose_gnome — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 15:23:02 GMT

It would be great if you could make it so that you could draw on a part you've previously drawn on, as currently when you go to a new page or something, it deselects what you were drawing, and then you can't draw on top/around what you have previously drawn, as it just thinks you're trying to select your drawing to move it. It also deselects when you try and change colour, meaning that when you try to draw with a different colour on top of something you've already drawn, it just moves it instead of drawing.

It would also be useful if you could add shapes and stamps to the annotate feature, allowing you to put check marks/crosses for when you're filling out a form, or add square/circles to a pdf if needed.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rrandor — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 08:30:39 GMT

I am happy FireFox added a pdf editor. The one I paid for sucks; worst UI ever for an editor. But I am surprised that I cant add, edit and follow hyperlinks in the Firefox pdf editor. Come on! Firefox is a browser! I hope that feature is coming soon. Thanks for your hard work.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

rrandor — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 08:40:28 GMT

I am curious. It seems that the pdf standard is not smart enough to page without cropping text. I see this on every pdf editor. They just cut off the page at a certain length and it doesnt matter if they have to cut a line of text in half! This seems bizarre to me that the pdf standard doesnt flow text around page boundaries. Am I the only one who finds this to be a BUG?

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

sandraghassen — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 06:21:31 GMT

Great to hear from you! other capabilities could be the following:

common editing tools could be added like font, bold, italic
selection, copy/paste,text highlight
compilation of several pdf into one or split one file into single pages
conversion from other formats to pdf
When editing a pdf in Firefox, is it possible to detect the original font used and type same?

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

adi04 — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 09:11:36 GMT

When I start writing on pdf, the slides of pdf start moving to next slide, and I'm unable to writE.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Paul_AS — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 23:31:39 GMT

Hi, thanks for the new pdf feature, however I could not get it to work!
On the supplied sample pdf I clicked all over it and could not get it to accept any input,
Eventually I figured out I had to use the toolbar - How about telling us how to use it!

Anyway, all I could do was add silly text panels, not actually "Edit pdf in FireFox" as advertised.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

mak1 — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 21:12:49 GMT

hello i usually read 700 pages books is there a way with the new pdf editing feature of fire fox to make the pdf open on the page i close it on

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

AlainMig — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 09:14:57 GMT

Hi, I'm not sure about this. Firefox is a browser, not a pdf tool, what next ? spreadsheet capabilities ?

This makes firefox heavier on resources, slower.. And when I want to edit a pdf tool I use a dedicated tool that will do the job better than firefox anyway.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

MWPollard — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 12:50:30 GMT

I saw similar comments, but not these specific ones. I'd like to be able to:
- Select a font - any installed font
- Select a specific point size, for which I can type a number - not just a slider, though I see some may like that
- Select whether the boundary box autoexpands horizontally, or if the text will wrap within the current width
- Move an existing note, both by mouse and by keyboard for accurate placement, which is particularly useful when filling forms where I want them to line up with the underlines and other fields
- Copy existing notes with alignment lock (hold Ctrl while dragging to copy, hold Shift to align with the original) so multiple notes line up), and select multiple notes to copy or delete at once (Ctrl-click)
- Insert and resize an image, so I can "sign" a document.
The free program Foxit PDF Reader has most of these abilities.
That said, this is a good first version.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

webistrator — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 15:10:49 GMT

It's just another alternative, Alain. I have found an adage that one uses 10% of software's functionality 90% of the time; the remaining 90% of the available functionality is used little. Oversimplification? Maybe, but to pay the Canadians' the price for things one uses little is silly, n'est ce pas?

Re: Neue PDF Tools

Jffox — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:31:32 GMT

Hello! Thanks for this feature, but you should have the option to choose the font of the text. The rest is fine.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

js2 — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 08:27:58 GMT

The PDF editor is a very welcome change, but I am having a few problems with the "pen" feature:

Smoothing is very aggressive, making handwriting/signatures very difficult to write accurately (bug already filed on Bugzilla).
Shapes are grouped together even if they are completely separate. This means the shapes cannot be resized/moved separately, and prevents drawing anything between them (as selecting the group takes priority over drawing).
ctrl-z doesn't seem to affect resizing/moving text or shapes, only creating them.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

ryandtai95 — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 16:27:14 GMT

Hi Romain,

When opening PDFs with notation fields in Firefox, I'm running into an issue that's unique to Firefox (not experienced on Chrome, Edge, or Adobe Reader). When entering too much text in these fill-in fields, the text gets cut off as shown in the attached image. In the other PDF applications, the text size decreases to fit everything in the box. This would be a necessary feature for us to consider Firefox as a default PDF viewer at our organization.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Jon — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 14:49:34 GMT

Thanks for sharing, @ryandtai95! I'll link to your idea post here for more visibility:

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Aftermath — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 19:54:00 GMT

In my opinion, Edge offers the best basic PDF editing experience (for example for student reading and commenting on pdf files). I'm gonna list some differences, some of which might be bugs. I could happily file bugs or enhancment requests when asked to.

1- Firefox can't edit the annotations made by adobe acrobat and can't copy the text of the annotation. (Edge handles both in a good way)

2- Firefox can't "resize" the annotations from Acrobat Reader so that it fits when using tiling features (the pop-up with the annotation stays in its place on the right side of the screen). Edge gets this done (by moving the pop-up with the annotation to the middle of the screen)
https://imgur.com/a/sUU5Px8

3- Edge's Tool Bar:
- choice of icons is IMO clearer than Firefox's. (T) is known to be text, where this curved (I) is somehow new to me
- Their Icons are bigger and way easier to click on. Icons from firefox are even smaller then the mouse cursor itself
- The "Save" Feature is superior to Firefox's "Download" Feature. When editing PDF's, I don't want to download a PDF file each time I edit the file, but I simply want to save the edited file in case the computer/browser crashes or because I want continue editing later or the battery is about to die. I can see the point of having the original copy and downloading the edited one, but I don't think that it's being used more than simply saving the file (just like saving a word document for example, without wanting to download a word document each time you save it).
- The Tool Bar itself is IMHO prettier and more intuitive to use in Edge (maybe it's just because I got used to edge, other community members should also say their opinion about it)
https://imgur.com/8bGjuTl

4- Editing the added Text:
- Edge offers editing directly when pressing on the text you want to edit, without having to hover the mouse over to the right upper corner each time (In Firefox you would have to go to the upper right corner)
- Edge offers a simple button to make text bigger or smaller (Firefox has this bar which is not easy to use at all, as you have to be very careful for each step to make the text bigger, as each small mouse move makes the text noticeably bigger)
https://imgur.com/a/cwNAVpo

However: The Tool to add pictures (only on firefox) is one thing that Edge doesn't have, and it's really awesome. But all the mentioned things above makes me use edge on my computer solely for editing PDF's (and use Firefox for everyday browsing).

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

vnnd — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 02:29:51 GMT

To improve the functions of the editing option, would be interesting to give users the ability to modify the built-in shortcuts, specially to quickly change in between tools and highlighting colors.

Actually I am trying to add these shortcuts myself, I am looking into modifying the omni.ja. Any thoughts or suggestions?

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

wayfaringrob — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:31:09 GMT

Two things I would benefit greatly from: pressure sensitivity with the Draw tool (for things like Wacom tablets) and commenting on selected text a la Word/Google Docs or as a "sticky" like in Acrobat or macOS Preview. Without pressure sensitivity, drawings look pretty bad, and comments are a nice way to annotate without junking up the page.

It would also be nice to have a more convenient color picker (e.g. a small toolbar with 5 preset colors that stays open when using the draw tool), and as others have said, a more intuitive thickness controller.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

aww — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:51:28 GMT

Hi! I'd love to move to Firefox as my main PDF app. Some features I'd love to see in the future are

Text highlighting with comments/annotations
Bookmarking
Photo insertion (for signatures)

Good work with the current release!

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Jon — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 12:54:29 GMT

Thanks @aww! We're actually working on a couple of those features right now. Feel free to follow those specific idea threads here:

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

j-p_FF — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 17:06:29 GMT

Thank you Jon.
Feel free to link my post somewhere else for more visibility if useful.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

sandraghassen — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:50:05 GMT

Awesome! this is great. I have tried it and it works.

Re: Neue PDF Tools

haj — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 17:49:30 GMT

Hey @rtestard -- I was just about to submit this as a feature request when I saw that it had already been requested. The ability to draw straight lines when annotating pdfs (perhaps by holding shift?) or to highlight text directly would be incredibly useful! Thanks so much for the hard work that y'all do on product.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

sandraghassen — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 11:40:20 GMT

Hi Romain

Greatly to see the pdf tools are growing awesome. The filling up of form is really one of the best achievement .Keep up the hard work!

Got an idea regarding the editing tools - a cleaning tool to remove unwanted text or image or eraser to edit existing pdf documents.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

BandiSukaKasti — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 08:30:22 GMT

Hi. unlike edge or chrome . firefox doesnt save pdf state when i rotated pdf document using rotate button . when re opened pdf file it going back to default state. it is annoying

Re: Neue PDF Tools

Bheniardy — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 12:58:37 GMT

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

charlesharward — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:50:11 GMT

I like the new pdf ability, but it seems to not show some edits after you make them. It gets saved in the saved file or when you print it but not on screen.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

Jon — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 12:31:43 GMT

Wanted to jump back in this thread with a quick heads up...

We released highlighting in Firefox 125 and it's slowly being rolled out to all users—see thread here.

Thanks again for your ongoing participation in improving the PDF editing functionality 🙌

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

sandraghassen — Tue, 07 May 2024 10:15:30 GMT

The PDF editing functionalities are great. I initiated these functionalities in a workshop to a group of professional librarians who were amazed to see these possiblities.

I am also wandering for the following:

1. a tool to remove unwanted things in an exisiting pdf..like a tool for cleaning

2. edit/erase existing text

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

aserdark — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 07:27:37 GMT

It will be great if there is a list of annotations in the sidebar. So that we can track and find the annotations easily.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

harrywg — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 12:55:38 GMT

Yes, annotations in the sidebar would be useful.

Or failing that, at least a facility to "find next annotation" would be useful. As far as I can see, there isn't a way to do that.

Example: I have a 66 page PDF and I know I've made notes on four of the pages. Now I need to update the original document to incorporate those notes. But as far as I can see (and I've tried searching help, and looked at various third party "how to" guides), the only way to find those notes is to visually scroll through the annotated PDF.

Re: PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

nalayna — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 14:11:38 GMT

Hey,

I really love that I now can use Firefox to highlight the papers I am reading!! I do have some trouble with the toolbox covering the text, though. I suggested a fix as an idea, so please vote for it, if you have similar problems 🙂

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/display-pdf-highlighting-tools-when-hovering-only-or-more-to-the/idi-p/87819