A Firefox PDF plugin XSS vulnerability

Posted Jan 6, 2007 5:51 UTC (Sat) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

I'm afraid that I'll have to wait until the 9th to check them out, I'm in Beijing right now, visiting my wife's parents, and since an earthquake took out the Chinese main Internet line, I'm browsing pages at around 2kB/s (On &*^$%@$#*&* IE/Windows)... After 5 minutes, I could more or less only see the top bar, and a little of the windowbar on one of the pictures, still nothing on the other...

But about lineart; I did a few comparisons myself a couple of months back, on an e-ticket, there was a little logo, which at 100% looked a bit nicer in acroread, but when you zoomed in, it actually looked nicer in Evince than in acroread... Maybe they just have differing rendering settings at different zoom levels, or something.

Dennis

Posted Jan 8, 2007 23:35 UTC (Mon) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

Well, here's a comparison of Evince 0.6.1 versus Adobe Reader 7. I think you can see the difference in the quality of the line art.

Very nice, thanks. That matches my own gut impressions: Adobe uses some very nice scaling and interpolation algorithms in its PDF viewers, not only on fonts but also on vector lines (as here) and on embedded bitmaps like scanned US patents. And they're reasonably fast at it, too. I can't tell if it's full multitap resampling, but...nice (to quote Borat).

I have no doubts free software will catch up before very long, though I am a little surprised we're not there already. (Different priorities, I guess. :-) )

Greg

Posted Jan 11, 2007 17:29 UTC (Thu) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]

In your examples, the line art is anti-aliased in Acroread but not in Evince, and I think that the fonts are hinted in Acroread but not in Evince. These examples are consistent with what I've seen: you need to zoom in one or two more steps with xpdf to see the same amount of detail that you'd see in the Adobe product.

The anti-aliasing issue should be fixable - plenty of OSS graphics libraries can already do this. Getting the font rendering right is also possible - for example FreeType2 can do hinting - but it is patent-encumbered.