PDF.js

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

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.

Contributing

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

For further questions or guidance feel free to stop by #pdfjs on irc.mozilla.org.

Getting Started

Online demo

http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html

Browser Extensions

Firefox

PDF.js is built into version 19+ of Firefox, however two extensions are still available that are updated at a different rate:

Development Version - This version is updated every time new code is merged into the PDF.js codebase. This should be quite stable but still might break from time to time.
Stable Version - After version 24 of Firefox is released we no longer plan to support the stable extension. The stable version will then be considered whatever is built into Firefox.

Chrome

The Chrome extension is still somewhat experimental but it can be installed two ways:

Unofficial Version - This extension is maintained by a PDF.js contributor.
Build Your Own - Get the code as explained below and issue node make extension. Then open Chrome, go to Tools > Extension and load the (unpackaged) extension from the directory build/chrome.

Getting the Code

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

$ git clone git://github.com/mozilla/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:

$ node make server

You can install Node via nvm or the official package. 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

Building PDF.js

In order to bundle all src/ files into a final pdf.js and build the generic viewer, issue:

$ node make generic

This will generate the file build/generic/build/pdf.js that can be included in your final project. The pdf.js file is large and should be minified for production. Also, if you would like to support more browsers than Firefox you'll also need to include compatibility.js from build/generic/web/.