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In PR 11912 we started caching images that occur on multiple pages globally, which improved performance a lot in many PDF documents. However, one slightly annoying limitation of the implementation is the need to re-parse the image once the global-caching threshold has been reached. Previously this was difficult to avoid, since large image-resources will cause cleanup to run on the main-thread after rendering has finished. In PR 16108 we started delaying this cleanup a little bit, to improve performance if a user e.g. zooms and/or rotates the document immediately after rendering completes. Taking those two PRs together, we now have a situation where it's much more likely that the main-thread has "globally used" images cached at the page-level. Hence we can instead attempt to *copy* a locally cached image into the global object-cache on the main-thread and thus reduce unnecessary re-parsing of large/complex global images, which significantly reduces the rendering time in many cases. For the PDF document in issue 11878, the rendering time of *the second page* changes as follows (on my computer): - With the `master`-branch it takes >600 ms to render. - With this patch that goes down to ~50 ms, which is one order of magnitude faster. (Note that all other pages are, as expected, completely unaffected by these changes.) This new main-thread copying is limited to "large" global images, since: - Re-parsing of small images, on the worker-thread, is usually fast enough to not be an issue. - With the delayed cleanup after rendering, it's still not guaranteed that an image is available in a page-level cache on the main-thread. - This forces the worker-thread to wait for the main-thread, which is a pattern that you always want to avoid unless absolutely necessary.
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. 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 our Matrix room for questions or guidance.
Getting Started
Online demo
Please note that the "Modern browsers" version assumes native support for the latest JavaScript features; please also see this wiki page.
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Modern browsers: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html
-
Older browsers: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/legacy/web/viewer.html
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 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:
Building PDF.js
In order to bundle all src/ files into two production scripts and build the generic
viewer, run:
$ gulp generic
If you need to support older browsers, run:
$ 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.
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:
The API documentation can be found at:
Questions
Check out our FAQs and get answers to common questions:
Talk to us on Matrix:
File an issue: