PDF.js

PDF.js is a Portable Document Format (PDF) viewer that is built with HTML5.

PDF.js is community-driven and supported by Mozilla. Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering PDFs.

Contributing

PDF.js is an open source project and always looking for more contributors. To get involved, visit:

Feel free to stop by our Matrix room for questions or guidance.

Getting Started

Online demo

Please note that the "Modern browsers" version assumes native support for the latest JavaScript features; please also see this wiki page.

Modern browsers: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html
Older browsers: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/legacy/web/viewer.html

Browser Extensions

Firefox

PDF.js is built into version 19+ of Firefox.

Chrome

The official extension for Chrome can be installed from the Chrome Web Store. This extension is maintained by @Rob--W.
Build Your Own - Get the code as explained below and issue gulp chromium. Then open Chrome, go to Tools > Extension and load the (unpackaged) extension from the directory build/chromium.

Getting the Code

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

$ git clone https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js.git
$ cd pdf.js

Next, install Node.js via the official package or via nvm. You need to install the gulp package globally (see also gulp's getting started):

$ npm install -g gulp-cli@^2.3.0

If you prefer to not install gulp-cli globally, you have to prefix all the gulp commands with npx (for example, npx gulp server instead of gulp server).

If everything worked out, install all dependencies for PDF.js:

$ npm install

Note

On MacOS M1/M2 you may see some node-gyp-related errors when running npm install. This is because one of our dependencies, "canvas", does not provide pre-built binaries for this platform and instead npm will try to build it from source. Please make sure to first install the necessary native dependencies using brew: https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas#compiling.

Finally, you need to start a local web server as some browsers do not allow opening PDF files using a file:// URL. Run:

$ gulp server

and then you can open:

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

Please keep in mind that this assumes the latest version of Mozilla Firefox; refer to Building PDF.js for non-development usage of the PDF.js library.

It is also possible to view all test PDF files on the right side by opening:

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

Building PDF.js

In order to bundle all src/ files into two production scripts and build the generic viewer, run:

$ gulp generic

If you need to support older browsers, run:

$ gulp generic-legacy

This will generate pdf.js and pdf.worker.js in the build/generic/build/ directory (respectively build/generic-legacy/build/). Both scripts are needed but only pdf.js needs to be included since pdf.worker.js will be loaded by pdf.js. The PDF.js files are large and should be minified for production.

Using PDF.js in a web application

To use PDF.js in a web application you can choose to use a pre-built version of the library or to build it from source. We supply pre-built versions for usage with NPM and Bower under the pdfjs-dist name. For more information and examples please refer to the wiki page on this subject.

Including via a CDN

PDF.js is hosted on several free CDNs:

Learning

You can play with the PDF.js API directly from your browser using the live demos below:

Interactive examples

More examples can be found in the examples folder. Some of them are using the pdfjs-dist package, which can be built and installed in this repo directory via gulp dist-install command.

For an introduction to the PDF.js code, check out the presentation by our contributor Julian Viereck: