Tech Tip – Annotating, Signing, And Saving PDFs In The Mozilla Firefox Browser

Tech Tip – Annotating, Signing, And Saving PDFs In The Mozilla Firefox Browser

With the release of Firefox 104 in August users now have the ability to annotate PDFs, for example, to be able to sign PDFs directly in the browser, and then to save them.

Here is how:

  • Open a PDF in Firefox by either right clicking on the PDF and selecting "Open with" and choosing Firefox, or Open Firefox and drag and drop the PDF into the open browser
  • You should see the "Add Free Text Annotation" button at the top right-hand corner of the screen which looks like a large T, click on this button.  If this button doesn't exist, scroll to the bottom of this page for details on how to enable it.
  • Position the cursor on the PDF page where you want to annotate the text and click, a red text box will appear, and you can start to add text.  You will also see at the top right-hand corner the option to change the annotation text colour and size.
  • At the top right-hand corner, there is also a button that looks like a pen which is the "Add Ink Annotation" button.  If you click this button, it allows you to do handwriting and markups in the PDF.
  • Once you have marked up the PDF, you can download it by clicking on the "Download" button which looks like a folder with a down arrow on it.  This prompts you for the location to save the PDF to and gives you the ability to rename it.

If your version of Firefox doesn't have these options enabled, first check you are running the latest version of Firefox, to do this, open Firefox, click on top righthand menu, which is the three horizonal lines, select "Help", then select "About Firefox".  This will show you the version of Firefox and tell you if your browser is up to date.  It needs to be on version 104 or above.

If you are running a version of Firefox that is 104 or later and it still isn't showing the options do the following

  • Open the advanced preferences in Firefox, do this by typing about:config into the URL address bar and press enter
  • Click on the "Accept the Risk and Continue" button
  • Type pdfjs.annotationEditorMode in the Search Preference bar at the top of the screen and press enter
  • Click the pen symbol on the righthand side to enable you to change the value, change this to 0 (for clarity, this is a zero), then click on blue tick on the righthand side to save it
  • Then clear the text in the Search Preference bar and then type pdfjs.annotationMode  and press enter
  • Again, click on the pen symbol on the righthand side to enable you to change the value, change this to 2 and click on the blue tick on the righthand side to save it
  • Close Firefox and reopen it to enable the features
  • Drag a PDF into the browser window and check the tools are there.  If not, call us for further help! 

Publish Date: Oct 13, 2022