PdfiumViewer

LGPL License.

Introduction

PdfiumViewer is a PDF viewer based on the PDFium project.

PdfiumViewer provides a number of components to work with PDF files:

PdfDocument is the base class used to render PDF documents;
PdfRenderer is a WinForms control that can render a PdfDocument;
PdfiumViewer is a WinForms control that hosts a PdfRenderer control and adds a toolbar to save the PDF file or print it.

Compatibility

The PdfiumViewer library has been tested with Windows XP and Windows 8, and is fully compatible with both. The PDFium library included in this project is a 32-bit version, so your .NET application need to be 32-bit too. It works without problems on 64-bit Windows though.

Using the library

To use the library, you must first add a reference to the NuGet package.

After you've added this reference, two files will be added to your project:

x86\pdfium.dll is the 32-bit version of the Pdfium library;
x64\pdfium.dll is the 64-bit version of the Pdfium library.

You have two options. If your application is 32-bit only or 64-bit only, you can remove the DLL that won't be used. You can leave this file in the x86 or x64 directory, or move it to the root of your project. PdfiumViewer will find the DLL in both cases.

When building your project, the pdfiumdll library(s) must be placed next to your application, either in the root or the x86 or x64 sub directory. The easiest way to accomplish this is by changing the properties of that file, changing the Copy to Output Directory setting to Copy always.

Building PDFium

To build PDFium for Windows, you need Visual Studio.

The PDFium source code does not have project files for Visual Studio. The full instructions to get to a project you can open in Visual Studio, you need to follow the steps at https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/wiki/Build.

One addition to the instructions on the website is that the build\gyp_pdfium command is a Python script. To execute this, execute python build\gyp_pdfium. Also, one of the projects require the Python executable to be in the PATH. depot_tools has a Python which can be used for this.

After this, you can open the all.sln solution from the build directory. The project is configured to create static libraries. However, we need a dynamic library for PdfiumViewer. To have it generate a dynamic library, the following changes must be made to the configuration of the pdfium project:

Before opening the project properties, first set the Configuration to Release;
In the General tab, Configuration Type must be set to Dynamic Library (.dll);
In the C/C++ | Preprocessor tab, the Preprocessor Definition FPDFSDK_EXPORTS must be added to have the DLL export the correct symbols;
In the Linker | Input tab, the Additional Dependencies must be set to. This dialog appears after you've saved and re-opened the project configuration:

kernel32.lib
user32.lib
advapi32.lib
gdi32.lib
winmm.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fdrm.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fpdfdoc.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fpdfapi.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fpdftext.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\formfiller.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fxcodec.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fxcrt.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fxedit.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fxge.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\javascript.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\v8_base.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\v8_libbase.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\icui18n.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\icuuc.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\v8_snapshot.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\jsapi.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\pdfwindow.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\freetype.lib

The platform toolset must be set to support Windows XP. The easiest way to do this is by performing a search and replace on all .vcxproj files in the PDFium source directory, replacing <PlatformToolset>v120</PlatformToolset> with <PlatformToolset>v120_xp</PlatformToolset>. I believe you only need to do this for Visual Studio 2013, but I don't have access to a previous version of Visual Studio, so I cannot verify this;
The V8 ICU engine must be initialized. However, this is a C++ interface which is difficult to access through P/Invoke. Instead, we make a small modification to fpdfsdk\src\fpdfview.cpp. After the last include line, add #include "../../v8/include/v8.h". Then, at the top of the FPDF_InitLibrary function, add the line v8::V8::InitializeICU();.

You may have to run the build a few times because the dependencies don't appear to be resolved correctly. For me, the second time the build completes successfully.

After you've made these changes and compiled the solution, you will get a valid DLL which can be copied into the "Libraries/Pdfium" directory of the project.

To build the 64-bit version of the Pdfium library, drop down the Release option in the toolbar and open the Configuration Manager. There, change the Active solution platform to x64. The steps to update the project configuration explained above need to be performed again because they are dependent on the platform.

Bugs

Bugs should be reported through github at http://github.com/pvginkel/PdfiumViewer/issues.

License

PdfiumViewer is licensed under the LGPL 3. See the license details for how PDFium is licensed.