Firefox PDF Reader Passes 'Pixel-Perfect' Test

Posted 07/05/2011 at 8:12am | by Paul Lilly

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If there were a mountain nearby, Mozilla and its team of programmers would be shouting from the top of it. They'll have to settle for cyberspace. What is it that has Mozilla so excited, you ask? Mozilla's programmers have been working on a Web-based PDF reader to replace those clunky third-party alternatives once and for all, and they just demonstrated the pixel perfect rendering of a brutal test file.

Mozilla's pdf.js project uses HTML5 and JavaScript to render PDF files, and it's Mozilla's goal to use pdf.js to render PDF's natively within Firefox. By doing so, most users would no longer need to turn to dedicated PDF readers like Acrobat, Foxit, and Sumatra.

The test file Mozilla is touting is a research paper with formatted text with Type 1 fonts, graphics with shadows, tables, and diagrams. Mozilla said it chose the pixel-perfect rendering of this particular paper as its first milestone because "getting there required solving some hard problems, and it's easier to focus attention on one target. We want to prove that a competitive HTML5 PDF renderer really is feasible, and not just fun talk." Mozilla's pdf.js project isn't just for Firefox, either.

"We intend pdf.js to work in all HTML5-compliant browsers," Mozilla explains. "And that, by definition, means pdf.js should work equally well on all operating systems that those browsers run on."

Do you use an external PDF reader? If so, which one?