Confusing PDF editing possibility

[madduck]

I just uploaded a PDF to our new OpenCloud and was amazed to find out about the wonderful PDF editing/commenting/markup possibilities:

Turns out, however, that this seems to be a feature of Firefox, and edits like this are not available to other viewers of the PDF. In fact, when I closed the document, thinking that my edits would be saved, I irrevocably lost them.

I would have needed to save the PDF with the Firefox editor, and then upload the new PDF.

I understand that live commenting/drawing/highlighting of PDFs is not a feature of Collabora, or is it? How hard would it be?

And if too hard, would it be possible to save the commented/marked-up PDF to OpenCloud directly?

And while this is not possible, can the user be warned before closing a document that their markups/highlights/comments will be lost unless saved?

[micbar]

Like you said, this is the firefox pdf viewer, AFAICT we have no control over that.

Is that correct @AlexAndBear @kulmann ?

[AlexAndBear]

Correct. Mozilla Firefox is using the pdfjs lib. There is no api in the package available to persist or upload those changes.

[madduck]

Thank you @AlexAndBear and @micbar. I understand what you are telling me. At this point, there are two open questions:

1. is it conceivable to bridge between WOPI and PDF.js somehow? I mean, the latter has editing capabilities… would it be worth to suggest this to the devs, or will I be laughed out of the room?

2. Meanwhile, can we do something in OpenCloud so that our users don't edit PDFs thinking they are doing so collaboratively, and then losing their work when they fail to save to a local file?