938dffb06b
When testing the new `PDFHistory` implementation in practice, I felt that the current value of `UPDATE_VIEWAREA_TIMEOUT` is too large to be truly useful. The purpose of the timeout is to attempt to address (the PDF.js part of) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1153393, and it's currently fairly easy for the user e.g. close the browser before the timeout had a change to finish. Obviously, the timeout is a best-effort solution, but with the current value of `UPDATE_VIEWAREA_TIMEOUT` it's not as useful as one would want. Please note that lowering it shouldn't be a problem, since it still prevents the browser history from updating at *every* 'updateviewarea' event or during (quick) scrolling, which is all that's really needed to not impact the UX negatively. --- Furthermore, with this lower timeout, we can also simplify the part of the 'popstate' event handler that attempted to update the browser history with the current position before moving back. In most cases, the current position will now already exist in the history, and this *greatly* decreases the complexity of this code path. The main impetus for this change though, is that I unfortunately found that given the asynchronous nature of updating the browser history, there is some *edge* cases where that code could cause history corruption. In practice, the user could thus get "stuck" at a particular history entry and not be able to move back. I haven't got any reliable STR for this, since it's so difficult to trigger, but it involved navigating around in a document such that a number of destinations are added to the browser history and then changing the rotation before going back/forward in the history. Rather that attempting to patch this code, and making it even more difficult to understand than it already is or adding more asynchronous behaviour, by far the easiest solution is to remove it and simply rely on the (lowered) `UPDATE_VIEWAREA_TIMEOUT` instead.
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 (and Seamonkey)
PDF.js is built into version 19+ of Firefox, however, one extension is still available:
-
Development Version - This extension is mainly intended for developers/testers, and it is updated every time new code is merged into the PDF.js codebase. It should be quite stable but might break from time to time.
-
Please note that the extension is not guaranteed to be compatible with Firefox versions that are older than the current ESR version, see the Release Calendar.
-
The extension should also work in Seamonkey, provided that it is based on a Firefox version as above (see Which version of Firefox does SeaMonkey 2.x correspond with?), but we do not guarantee compatibility.
-
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 git://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.
Learning
You can play with the PDF.js API directly from your browser using the live demos below:
The repository contains a hello world example that you can run locally:
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:
Questions
Check out our FAQs and get answers to common questions:
Talk to us on IRC:
- #pdfjs on irc.mozilla.org
File an issue:
Follow us on twitter: @pdfjs