Cannot highlights text in PDF that can only open read-only

Development
1

I am trying to confirm if it is still not possible for PDF to open so that we can highlight text in it. I have read some content with @darshan who confirmed there is read-only mode for pdf. I am wondering if this has improved or if there are any way we can highlight and ever search in PDF’s. This makes working with PDF file a lot easier.

I have done Tshooting below.

It might be related to this topic

Some notes related troubleshooting with AI

Collabora CODE 26.04.2.2 — PDF opens read-only, no annotation, but I found the cause

Custom WOPI host (PHP). DOCX/XLSX/etc. open in edit fine with a full toolbar. PDFs opened read-only with no annotation tools.

Setup: CheckFileInfo returns UserCanWrite: true. My integration builds the iframe URL from the text/plain action’s urlsrc and appended permission=edit to it.

What I tried:

  • Confirmed UserCanWrite: true — not the issue.
  • Ruled out CSP (coolwsd’s default style-src 'self' — the inline-violation console warnings are harmless; DOCX edits fine with the same CSP).
  • Checked discovery: PDF only has the view_comment action (no edit), as expected.

The fix that worked: removing permission=edit from the PDF’s cool.html URL. With it removed, the PDF opens in writable view_comment mode and comments/annotations work.

My conclusion: forcing permission=edit on a PDF (which only supports view_comment) drops it to plain read-only. Leaving permission unset + UserCanWrite: true correctly enters annotation mode.

Question for the forum: is this expected behavior — i.e. should hosts never pass permission=edit for PDFs and rely on UserCanWrite + the view_comment action instead? Or is edit-on-PDF silently falling back to read-only a bug?