A Firefox PDF plugin XSS vulnerability
A Firefox PDF plugin XSS vulnerability
Posted Jan 4, 2007 19:00 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467)In reply to: A Firefox PDF plugin XSS vulnerability by pr1268
Parent article: A Firefox PDF plugin XSS vulnerability
The quality of the rendering in Adobe Reader is far higher than any of the free clones. I spend a good chunk of my time reading data sheets for electronic components and they are pretty well unreadable in Evince/XPDF/KPDF. In Adobe Reader they look tremendous.
That said, I never use the browser plugin.
Posted Jan 5, 2007 8:35 UTC (Fri)
by Los__D (guest, #15263)
[Link] (4 responses)
This includes quite a bit of datasheets from Atmel, Micrel, Microchip (damn I hate PICs), Epson, TI, National, and way too many from suppliers that still think that photographs put into PDF's are perfectly acceptable.
Posted Jan 5, 2007 18:15 UTC (Fri)
by jwb (guest, #15467)
[Link] (3 responses)
http://tastic.brillig.org/~jwb/evince-vs-adobe.png
Posted Jan 6, 2007 5:51 UTC (Sat)
by Los__D (guest, #15263)
[Link]
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]
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]
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.
Strange, I use quite a bit of electronic datasheets, and all of them them has looked perfect in Evince so far. (And yes, I have done comparisons to be sure, as I also have had less than acceptable results in the past).A Firefox PDF plugin XSS vulnerability
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.A Firefox PDF plugin XSS vulnerability
http://tastic.brillig.org/~jwb/evince-vs-adobe2.png
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...A Firefox PDF plugin XSS vulnerability
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.
A Firefox PDF plugin XSS vulnerability
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.A Firefox PDF plugin XSS vulnerability
