pdf.js

Overview

pdf.js is an HTML5 technology experiment that explores building a faithful and efficient Portable Document Format (PDF) renderer without native code assistance.

pdf.js is community-driven and supported by Mozilla Labs. Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering PDFs, and eventually release a PDF reader extension powered by pdf.js. Integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves successful.

Getting started

Online demo

For an online demo, visit:

http://andreasgal.github.com/pdf.js/web/viewer.html

This demo provides an interactive interface for displaying and browsing PDFs using the pdf.js API.

Getting the code

To get a local copy of the current code, clone it using git:

    git clone git://github.com/andreasgal/pdf.js.git pdfjs
    cd pdfjs

Next, you need to start a local web server as some browsers don't allow opening PDF files for a file:// url:

  make server

If everything worked out, you can now serve

http://localhost:8888/web/viewer.html

You can also view all the test pdf files on the right side serving

http://localhost:8888/test/pdfs/?frame

Hello world

For a "hello world" example, take a look at:

examples/helloworld/

This example illustrates the bare minimum ingredients for integrating pdf.js in a custom project.

Contributing

pdf.js is a community-driver project, so contributors are always welcome. Simply fork our repo and contribute away. A great place to start is our open issues. For better consistency and long-term stability, please do look around the code and try to follow our conventions.

If you don't want to hack on the project or have short spare times, you still can help! Just open PDFs in the online demo and report any breakage in rendering.

Running the Tests

pdf.js comes with browser-level regression tests that allow one to probe whether it's able to successfully parse PDFs, as well as compare its output against reference images, pixel-by-pixel.

To run the tests, first configure the browser manifest file at:

test/resources/browser_manifests/browser_manifest.json

Sample manifests for different platforms are provided in that directory.

To run all the bundled tests, type:

$ make test

and cross your fingers. Different types of tests are available, see the test manifest file at:

test/test_manifest.json

The test type eq tests whether the output images are identical to reference images. The test type load simply tests whether the file loads without raising any errors.

Additional resources

Our demo site is here:

http://andreasgal.github.com/pdf.js/web/viewer.html

You can read more about pdf.js here:

http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/

http://blog.mozilla.com/cjones/2011/06/15/overview-of-pdf-js-guts/

Follow us on twitter: @pdfjs

http://twitter.com/#!/pdfjs

Join our mailing list:

dev-pdf-js@lists.mozilla.org

Subscribe either using lists.mozilla.org or Google Groups:

https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-pdf-js

https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.pdf-js/topics

Talk to us on IRC:

#pdfjs on irc.mozilla.org