b76cf665ec
There have been lots of problems with trying to map glyphs to their unicode
values. It's more reliable to just use the private use areas so the browser's
font renderer doesn't mess with the glyphs.
Using the private use area for all glyphs did highlight other issues that this
patch also had to fix:
* small private use area - Previously, only the BMP private use area was used
which can't map many glyphs. Now, the (much bigger) PUP 16 area can also be
used.
* glyph zero not shown - Browsers will not use the glyph from a font if it is
glyph id = 0. This issue was less prevalent when we mapped to unicode values
since the fallback font would be used. However, when using the private use
area, the glyph would not be drawn at all. This is illustrated in one of the
current test cases (issue #8234) where there's an "ä" glyph at position
zero. The PDF looked like it rendered correctly, but it was actually not
using the glyph from the font. To properly show the first glyph it is always
duplicated and appended to the glyphs and the maps are adjusted.
* supplementary characters - The private use area PUP 16 is 4 bytes, so
String.fromCodePoint must be used where we previously used
String.fromCharCode. This is actually an issue that should have been fixed
regardless of this patch.
* charset - Freetype fails to load fonts when the charset size doesn't match
number of glyphs in the font. We now write out a fake charset with the
correct length. This also brought up the issue that glyphs with seac/endchar
should only ever write a standard charset, but we now write a custom one.
To get around this the seac analysis is permanently enabled so those glyphs
are instead always drawn as two glyphs.
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:
Questions
Check out our FAQs and get answers to common questions:
Talk to us on IRC (Internet Relay Chat):
- #pdfjs on irc.mozilla.org
File an issue:
Follow us on twitter: @pdfjs