Mozilla's browser-based pdf project 'close' to reality

Efforts to make a JavaScript-based PDF reader for Mozilla’s Firefox and other HTML5-enabled browsers appeared to gain more ground in July after its pdf.js project reached a “milestone." Programmers Andreas Gal and Chris Jones said pdf.js said that version 0.2 of their project managed to render the Tracemonkey paper perfectly, dynamically loading TrueType and Type 1 fonts. “This is the most dramatic demonstration of pdf.js’s biggest feature in 0.2: loading Type 1 fonts ... Dynamically loading Type 1 fonts into a web application was a big challenge," they said in Mozilla’s blog. Another new feature of pdf.js’s new viewer involves a “preview panel" that pops out when the mouse hovers over the dark bar on the left side of the page. Gal and Jones also noted the pdf.js project has a “great and growing community," with many contributing to improve the product, such as implementing support for encrypted PDFs and embedded JPEGs. “Everyone has done their fair share of bug fixing," they said. They said they want pdf.js to work in all HTML5-compliant browsers, and equally well on all operating systems that those browsers run on. Problems that need fixing But for now, they admitted that pdf.js currently produces different results on different browsers and operating systems. “We said above that pdf.js renders the Tracemonkey paper ‘perfectly’ … if you’re running a Firefox nightly. On a Windows 7 machine where Firefox can use Direct2D and DirectWrite. If you ignore what appears to be a bug in DirectWrite’s font hinting," they said. They added the paper is rendered less well on other platforms and in older Firefox versions, and even worse in other browsers. For now, they said pdf.js has now reached the point where a big portion of its issues are browser-rendering-engine bugs, or missing features. Goals for next version For their next release, Gal and Jones said they have two big goals – to continue adding features needed to render PDFs and pixel-perfect rendering of the PDF 1.7 specification itself. “We want pdf.js to be a community driven and governed open-source project. We want to use it for Firefox, but we think there are many cool applications for it. We would love to see it embedded in other browsers or web applications; because it’s written only in standards-compliant web technologies, the code will run in any compliant browser," they said. — TJD, GMA News