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Comment by voldacar | Hacker News Reader

Truly revolutionary tech

Well, it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package, so in a way—yes.

What's the problem with the Poppler-based ones? I've been producing (with LaTeX) and consuming (with Poppler/Okular) PDFs for a decade and never once have I had to worry about anything related to the format (including tracking).

Poppler looks great! But, I _just_ learned about it and I don't think that the majority of population, say, outside of HN knows about its existence, so it's good to have a fairly mainstream alternative available.

OK, Firefox is, sadly, far from being a mainstream browser nowadays, but still I suspect it has a larger user base than Poppler.

Which PDF readers contain tracking? Anyway, there are several open-source ones that don't.

Acrobat and Chrome come to mind.

> it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package

Uh, what? Firefox supports javascript. PDFs support javascript. Javascript empowers tracking.

Firefox PDF support is actually Javascript.

https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

following that logic

- every browser that supports cookies comes with a tracking package

- electron comes with a tracking package

- every language interpreter, runtime or compiler is a tracking package.

- your OS can run tracking software, thus coming with a tracking package.

- Anyone carrying their phone comes with a tracking package

Hang on, did you just post something on the internet? Your HN account comes with a tracking package!

You say in jest, but this simple upgrade very likely improves the lives of more people more significantly than some billion dollar unicorns ever do.

And here I was thinking we were living in the future when I could print out a pdf, fill out the fields with a pencil, take a picture of it, then email it to myself, change the file type back to pdf, and send it to whomever requested it...

I think it was William Gibson who once stated something like, "The future is already here, it is simply unequally distributed...in that, some people just fill out PDF forms, while others have to print it out, fill it out with a pencil...etc...." Ok, maybe i'm remembering that quote inaccurately. ;-)

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