PDF annotations in Firefox 106 - Give us your feedback!

[rtestard]

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-...

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!

[zaidi]

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

[webistrator]

Try Hypothesis annotator/highlighter if you want nice, clean highlighting. It's free, but you must download the annotation tool. More at https://web.hypothes.is/

[Selinth]

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

[rtestard]

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

[Selinth]

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.

[calixte]

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.

[jhteach]

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.

[sterafix]

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.

[GutachterKaplan]

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.

[webistrator]

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.

[j-p_FF]

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