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.
PDF.js is an open source project and always looking for more contributors. To get involved, visit:
- Issue Reporting Guide
- Code Contribution Guide
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Good Beginner Bugs
- Projects
Feel free to stop by our Matrix room for questions or guidance.
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
PDF.js is built into version 19+ of Firefox.
- 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
npx gulp chromium
. Then open Chrome, go toTools > Extension
and load the (unpackaged) extension from the directorybuild/chromium
.
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. 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:
$ npx gulp server
and then you can open:
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:
In order to bundle all src/
files into two production scripts and build the generic
viewer, run:
$ npx gulp generic
If you need to support older browsers, run:
$ npx 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.
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.
PDF.js is hosted on several free CDNs:
- https://www.jsdelivr.com/package/npm/pdfjs-dist
- https://cdnjs.com/libraries/pdf.js
- https://unpkg.com/pdfjs-dist/
You can play with the PDF.js API directly from your browser using the live demos below:
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 npx gulp dist-install
command.
For an introduction to the PDF.js code, check out the presentation by our contributor Julian Viereck:
More learning resources can be found at:
The API documentation can be found at:
Check out our FAQs and get answers to common questions:
Talk to us on Matrix:
File an issue: