Tech Tip – Annotating, Signing, And Saving PDFs In Firefox

The release of Firefox 104 in August gave users the ability to annotate PDFs, e.g. sign PDFs directly in the browser, and save them. Here’s how:

– Open a PDF in Firefox, i.e. drag it into the Firefox Window, or right click on the file and select ‘Open with’ and choose Firefox.

– In the top right corner of the PDF window click on the ‘Add Free Text Annotation’ icon (a ‘T’ symbol). 

– Click on the page and start writing. You can change the text colour and size.

– Also top right (a pen symbol), click on the ‘Add Link Annotation’ icon to use a virtual pen to annotate or sign a document freehand. The colour and line thickness can be adjusted.

– To save an annotated PDF, click on the ‘Download’ button in the toolbar.

– To disable annotation editing, click on the arrow symbol (top right).

If Firefox browser doesn’t yet have the annotation options:

– Type about:config in the address bar, press Enter, click on ‘Accept the risk’ and ‘Continue.’

– Look for the preference pdfjs.annotationEditorMode, click the button next to it, and change the value to 0 (zero).

– Click the tick box to confirm and restart Firefox.