Leveraging pdf.js in Thunderbird
By Jonathan Protzenko on Saturday, December 3 2011, 23:54 - mozilla - Permalink
Thunderbird Conversations 2.2.1 has been released.
You can now view PDF attachments inside Thunderbird using pdf.js! You don't need an external viewer anymore. That's the pdf.js magic.
Clicking the icon opens a new tab with a mini-viewer (very basic functionality). It works pretty well, and the plan is to add a viewer inside the conversation, so that you can get some sort of inline pdf viewer, just below the email. That's a reasonably sized chunk of work, but I'm really busy right now, so it's not going to happen anytime soon; therefore, anyone coming with a patch would be extremely well-received :).
Comments
Wooooo! That's awesome!
To encourage other people to contribute patches, you should have opened each page of the PDF in its own tab ;)
Amazing!
Thanks for your help earlier on IRC...
Totally cool functionality!
Unfortunately I don't quite like the look and feel of Conversations and still prefer Thunderbird's default message display after trying to use it for couple of days.
Any chance this could be added to Thunderbird itself?
Andrew: you're EVIL! But yes that's a good idea I wish you'd told me before ;-)
fmms: most welcome, don't hesitate to ask more questions on IRC, we're always eager to help; I'm not always available but other people are friendly too. The channel is quiet on week-ends,though...
Merike: there were talks of adding this into Thunderbird itself, but the Thunderbird folks are busy, so I guess I got dibs on that one ;-). But yeah eventually they'll be able to reuse my code.
More generally, I think we'd want some MacOSX Preview-thingy for attachments: preview a PDF, an image, some text... we could even bundle some JS syntax highlighter for the text previewer. Conversations is a good testbed for that kind of stuff since it's easier to hack on it than on Thunderbird itself :).
So now probably it is the time for "odf" documents with using WebODF (http://webodf.org/) :)
Patches welcome :-)