1675842 - Firefox PDF rendering: extra spaces in between words and within words

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect)

Description

[13hu]

Attachment: Firefox PDF rendering: extra spaces in between words and within words

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:82.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/82.0

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox 82.0.2
macOS 10.14.6

• PDF https://www.dragos.com/wp-content/uploads/The_Four_Types-of_Threat_Detection.pdf page 15

highlight the text "behavioral analytics", in the last paragraph
copy the highlighted text

do the same thing in chrome

Actual results:

• Text gets copied as behavioral anal yti (sic)

Notice that the space in between words has three spaces, and there are extra spaces added within the second word.

Also on the page you can notice this if you Ctrl-F find behavioral a, it doesn't show matches but if you find on behavioral a (with three spaces), it matches.

This isn't an issue with the find component, but implies the PDF text rendering to the DOM is not accurate and is adding extra spaces. (which can be confirmed in inspector, see attached screenshot).

Chrome PDF viewer does not have this issue

Expected results:

text is represented and copied normally, without extra spaces rendered in

p.s. is Bugzilla still the location for reporting Firefox PDF viewer issues ?

I've seen https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues , but it seems like there are a lot of open issues on that project that aren't addressed. Maybe that's more of a prioritization and PM issue.
It would be good to see some of these text rendering and copying issues addressed, if Mozilla is going to continue with the pdf.js project and PDF support in Firefox.

Thanks for your work on this,