60bcce184e
For PDF documents with sufficiently broken XRef tables, it's usually quite obvious when you need to fallback to indexing the entire file. However, for certain kinds of corrupted PDF documents the XRef table will, for all intents and purposes, appear to be valid. It's not until you actually try to fetch various objects that things will start to break, which is the case in the referenced issues[1].
Since there's generally a real effort being in made PDF.js to load even corrupt PDF documents, this patch contains a suggested approach to attempt to do a bit more validation of the XRef table during the initial document loading phase.
Here the choice is made to attempt to load the *first* page, as a basic sanity check of the validity of the XRef table. Please note that attempting to load a more-or-less arbitrarily chosen object without any context of what it's supposed to be isn't a very useful, which is why this particular choice was made.
Obviously, just because the first page can be loaded successfully that doesn't guarantee that the *entire* XRef table is valid, however if even the first page fails to load you can be reasonably sure that the document is *not* valid[2].
Even though this patch won't cause any significant increase in the amount of parsing required during initial loading of the document[3], it will require loading of more data upfront which thus delays the initial `getDocument` call.
Whether or not this is a problem depends very much on what you actually measure, please consider the following examples:
```javascript
console.time('first');
getDocument(...).promise.then((pdfDocument) => {
console.timeEnd('first');
});
console.time('second');
getDocument(...).promise.then((pdfDocument) => {
pdfDocument.getPage(1).then((pdfPage) => { // Note: the API uses `pageNumber >= 1`, the Worker uses `pageIndex >= 0`.
console.timeEnd('second');
});
});
```
The first case is pretty much guaranteed to show a small regression, however the second case won't be affected at all since the Worker caches the result of `getPage` calls. Again, please remember that the second case is what matters for the standard PDF.js use-case which is why I'm hoping that this patch is deemed acceptable.
---
[1] In issue 7496, the problem is that the document is edited without the XRef table being correctly updated.
In issue 10326, the generator was sorting the XRef table according to the offsets rather than the objects.
[2] The idea of checking the first page in particular came from the "standard" use-case for the PDF.js library, i.e. the default viewer, where a failure to load the first page basically means that nothing will work; note how `{BaseViewer, PDFThumbnailViewer}.setDocument` depends completely on being able to fetch the *first* page.
[3] The only extra parsing is caused by, potentially, having to traverse *part* of the `Pages` tree to find the first page.
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 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, visit:
- Issue Reporting Guide
- Code Contribution Guide
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Good Beginner Bugs
- Projects
Feel free to stop by #pdfjs on irc.mozilla.org for questions or guidance.
Getting Started
Online demo
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 toTools > Extensionand load the (unpackaged) extension from the directorybuild/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
If everything worked out, install all dependencies for PDF.js:
$ npm install
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:
Please keep in mind that this requires an ES6 compatible browser; refer to Building PDF.js for usage with older browsers.
It is also possible to view all test PDF files on the right side by opening:
Building PDF.js
In order to bundle all src/ files into two production scripts and build the generic
viewer, run:
$ gulp generic
This will generate pdf.js and pdf.worker.js in the build/generic/build/ directory.
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:
- https://www.jsdelivr.com/package/npm/pdfjs-dist
- https://cdnjs.com/libraries/pdf.js
- https://unpkg.com/pdfjs-dist/
Learning
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 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:
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Check out our FAQs and get answers to common questions:
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- #pdfjs on irc.mozilla.org
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