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Microsoft IT

Microsoft Adds Adobe Acrobat PDF Tech To Its Edge Browser (betanews.com) 57

BetaNews: Yesterday, Microsoft announced it would be bringing AI to its Edge browser thanks to a partnership with ChatGPT owner OpenAI. Today the software giant adds something that many people will be less keen on -- Acrobat PDF technology. Describing the move as the next step to in their "commitment to transform the future of digital work and life," Microsoft and Adobe say this addition will give uses a unique PDF experience with extra features that will remain free of charge. By powering the built-in PDF reader with the Adobe Acrobat PDF engine, Microsoft says users will benefit from "higher fidelity for more accurate colors and graphics, improved performance, strong security for PDF handling, and greater accessibility -- including better text selection and read-aloud narration."
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Microsoft Adds Adobe Acrobat PDF Tech To Its Edge Browser

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  • I seem to remember getting pwned once back in the day by a drive-by PDF exploit. That was a pain to remove.

  • PDF is a horrible format for online text.
    Anything that encourages people to use it for online text instead of HTML or ( imagine! ) plain text is a BAD THING.

    Expect more 100MB PDF emails from the boss' secretary containing a single sentence...
    • > PDF is a horrible format for online text [so avoid it].

      You can't expect all content creators to be UIX/HTML/CSS experts, or hire one. That doesn't scale from a staffing perspective. WYSYWIG and paper-friendly content creation is far cheaper to do than "proper" HTML documents.

      As a tax payer, I wouldn't want to pay significantly more taxes if say all the online IRS or DMV documentation content required hiring an army of HTML experts to HTML-atize. For very common content, it makes sense for the most com

      • Minor Correction of: For very common content, it makes sense for the most common stuff, but not obscure and niche docs.

        Should be: For very common content it makes sense, but not obscure and niche docs.

      • What?

          > You can't expect all content creators to be UIX/HTML/CSS experts,

        You can't expect 'content creators' to be PDF experts either.

        Tools like this mean they will easily, dumbly, unthinkingly PRODUCE pdfs.

        Instead of using tools that allow them to easily PRODUCE HTML or plain text.
        • But anyone can unthinkingly produce pdfs, 'print to pdf' has existed for years and years - but somehow web developers don't use it. Hmm it's like they use the right tool for the job.

          -At some point this thread enters troll territory.
          • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

            Because they have the necessary expertise and experience to do it right. But multiply that education time by say 500 workers, and it ... doesn't scale.

        • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          > You can't expect 'content creators' to be PDF experts either.

          Most use MS-Office or clones of. They don't have to be PDF experts to make a PDF from those.

          > Instead of using tools that allow them to easily PRODUCE HTML or plain text.

          Pilot such a tool in a typical office environment and if-and-when the tool works, I'll agree to spreading it.

          One common complaint of similar such tools is that they are not WYSIWYG, especially when printing. It's one way on the author's screen and too different on paper or

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Try formatting logic or math in HTML, I'd rather eat a broom.

    • PDF isn't used for online text, it's used to render printable content.

      Expect more 100MB PDF emails from the boss' secretary containing a single sentence...

      The problem isn't PDF, or any software capabilities. The problem is your boss's secretary. ... Or maybe the problem is you upset her and she's doing it on purpose.

      • PDF should NEVER be used for online text, it should ONLY be used to render printable content.

        FTFY

        The problem is giving people the ability to produce PDFs more easily means more useless PDFs will be produced, and put in web pages and emailed.
        • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          well for long documents fixed design has one big advantage, when people say "that was never mentioned in doc x" you can do a search and say, yes go to line X on page Y and rtead the next tto paragraphs. a bit easier than refreing them to the toc and asking them to click link y then cont n paragraphs before staring to read. yea I knoew thiis example is somewhat constructed but it's a somewhat real example of when a fixed design (what PDF excels at is usefull. ok we might be able to do this in html, but it al
    • by schwit1 ( 797399 )

      PDF needs to go the way of Flash

    • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      I know pffs can bi on the large sde, but 100MB for a single sentence (unless it allso contains som eoverly detailed graphic) seams a tad excessive. Would you mind giving an example of what that one sentence pdf might contain in addition to said text? or am I just needlessly nit picking and taking your #one sentence" statement to literally?
      • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        just as a reference i decided to "print to pdf" this comment section result 19 A4 pages total size 1084KB(according to windows explorer) what kind of buggy pos software does your bosses secretary use, better contact the it department and have them check further I don't want to "!!hit you with them negative vibes" this early in the day (09:17 CET) but that ginormous PDF might indicate something being wrong. (disclosure I use an ad blocker so this the PDF I made is text only)
      • The latter.
  • by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:15PM (#63276277)
    We only just got rid of flash and now we are bringing back adobe plugins? Expect Microsoft and Adobe to EEE this some how. At least Firefox still has an independent pdf engine, although I only use firefox because its the best of the worst in this new web3 era.
    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Flash and Java Applets scratched certain itches that HTML/DOM/CSS/JS have a hard time solving well. The one-size-fits-all thinking of "everything through HTML" has been a big mistake. For example, web lacks consistent position control of text and missing roughly 15 common GUI widgets/idioms. We need extra or supplemental standards; web is failing or giving us a "clunky tax".

      • by butlerm ( 3112 )

        Flash might have survived if it became more of an open standard with detailed specifications that anyone could implement without reverse engineering something. Probably not for advertising, video, or general purpose websites, but for some things where it has a technical advantage.

      • For example, web lacks consistent position control of text

        That's because web windows can be resized arbitrarily.

        (which is a good thing)

        • I'm okay with optional auto-flow, I just don't want it forced (the only option). DOM absolute coordinates are defective, especially for text. Absolute text positioning is also needed for charts, such as flow-charts, ERD charts, etc.

  • In my opinion, no web browser should be in bed with any format and should not directly include ANY player/viewer/editor natively in the browser. Plugins to the applications of your choice is the only correct way.

    • Yup, browsers should require a plugin to render html so that users have a choice.
    • In my opinion, no web browser should be in bed with any format

      Indeed, a browser should just render a blank screen with text. No images, no videos, no audio, nothing. Those are all formats and we don't want browsers to be in bed when it should be on screen. It's not the browser's job to sleep on the job. It should just download everything and require you to open the files in a native application.

      Now excuse me while I fire up the photo viewer to see which of the buttons on the screen say submit*.

      *Note I'm being facetious, I know the buttons aren't graphics... on this si

  • Edge already had advanced features like the ability to annotate PDFS. I've used it quite a few times to fill out PDFs that were sent to me by people. Works so much better than printing them out and writing by hand.

    I also have a drawing table which is great for quickly adding notes to PDFs.

    • I'm worried about this honestly. Edge's PDF reader / editor is far better than Adobe's slow piece of crap. Sure the latter supports all sorts of weird and wonderful encryption schemes, and Edge has basically no colour management on PDFs to speak of, but honestly if I ever get stuck I can always open Acrobat for one of those files.

    • Edge already had advanced features like the ability to annotate PDFS. I've used it quite a few times to fill out PDFs that were sent to me by people. Works so much better than printing them out and writing by hand.

      I also have a drawing table which is great for quickly adding notes to PDFs.

      ie. Adding "More Adobe!" is a step backwards.

  • Adobe doesn't manage the Adobe PDF library code - That is managed by Datalogics out of Chicago. Adobe's efforts stops at the edge of either Windows or Mac OS (I can't remember which). Datalogics handles porting and integrating the library to other platforms.

    As for the the moron (@greytree) that thinks that HTML is superior to PDF - doesn't understand the use case for neither HTML nor PDF. Using PDF for HTML-type work via PDF Forms, doesn't work very well (stupid and sucks). Using HTML for PDF-type wo

    • by timelorde ( 7880 )

      > PDF predates HTML.

      Indeed. When Tim Berners-Lee was inventing HTML, what was drawing the dots on his NeXT system's screen? Display Postscript.

  • So every time I run Edge it leaks info to Adobe? Good to know, I'll avoid Edge even more now.

    • Leaks? No, that's wrong. It gushes! Adobe have mostly become a surveillance company now & they want to get their hooks further into people's devices for more of their data. That's the strongest reason I can see for this deal; Microsoft taking a cut of Adobe's surveillance profits. I have no Adobe or Windows software on any of my computers.
  • by Deathlizard ( 115856 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:28PM (#63276463) Homepage Journal

    As much as I Loathe Acrobat, this move by Microsoft is going to push a lot of enterprises towards Edge, especially if it means they can finally ditch installing Acrobat Reader.

    I know in our organization, 3rd party PDF readers including Edge, do not support the full feature set of Acrobat. Specifically electronically signed signatures via certificate. We pretty much had to either set edge to download every PDF our users run into and open them in Acrobat Reader, or force certain sites to IE compatibility mode. Edge supporting that alone would allow us to finally ditch IE for some of our intranet purchasing forms.

    • As much as I Loathe Acrobat, this move by Microsoft is going to push a lot of enterprises towards Edge, especially if it means they can finally ditch installing Acrobat Reader.

      How is this "not installing Acrobat Reader"?

    • This would be true for us.... except I suspect this PDF feature in Edge won't support third-party addons for Acrobat Reader, like the DRM plugin we have to install to allow our users to read PDFs from certain engineering/scientific sources.

      Instead we're forced to use policies that force Edge to download PDFs instead of display them, and ensure that Acrobat remains associated with PDFs, otherwise we get tickets about how these PDFs won't display.

      Absolutely, if we could avoid installing Reader I'd do it in a

  • I find improved text selection and TTS integration to be interesting features. Text selection was a disaster in PDFs for a long time. And the PDF documents were hard to integrate with speech.
  • So who is responsible if there is a security issue in the adobe engine?

    Will MS be able and willing to create a patch and send the update? Or will we have to wait for Adobe to create a patch, MS to verify / test (assuming they even do that nowadays) before releasing it to users?

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