1538111 - Firefox does not display text highlighted with evince in PDFs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect, P3)

Description

[Clemens Eisserer]

Attachment: loremipsum_annotated.pdf

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

opened a PDF document which was annotated (notes + highlighted text) using evince

Actual results:

notes are displayed, highlighted text isn't

Expected results:

firefox should behave like poppler, acrobat reader or google pdf preview and display the hightlighted text.

Comment 1

[Clemens Eisserer]

In times where emscripten and wasm perform so well, wouldn't it be better to replace pdf.js with poppler compiler to wasm? PDF seems to cause tons of troubles and maintenance costs - wouldn't it be better to have the pdf.js team join firefox again, instead of burning ressources for even mroe years?

Comment 2

[Brendan Dahl [:bdahl]]

(In reply to Clemens Eisserer from comment #1)

In times where emscripten and wasm perform so well, wouldn't it be better to replace pdf.js with poppler compiler to wasm? PDF seems to cause tons of troubles and maintenance costs - wouldn't it be better to have the pdf.js team join firefox again, instead of burning ressources for even mroe years?

Let's leave this bug for discussion about the annotation bug, but this has been considered and it is much more work than it appears to switch.

Tim,
Maybe you have some thoughts on why the annotation isn't working?

Comment 3

[Tim van der Meij]

The problem is that the highlight annotations don't have appearance streams, which is a deprecated practice for PDF file generators. We have two open issues on GitHub for solving this: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/6810 should make sure that we draw the yellow highlight correctly and https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/6811 should make sure that the highlight is able to go over multiple rows.

Comment 4

[Valentas]

Can confirm for Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:79.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/79.0.