ngx-extended-pdf-viewer

Bringing PDF to the Angular world

This library provides an embeddable PDF viewer component. It's different from other approaches like ng2-pdf-viewer in that it shows the full suite of UI widgets. In other words, it strongly resembles the PDF viewer of your browser:

More breaking changes ahead! What's new in Version 18?

Version 18 ships with quite a few improvements:

• It updates the find API,
• brings toolbar customization and responsive design to another level,
• gives you the option to add many buttons to the toolbar that used to hide in the secondary menu,
• adds more flexibility with for [pageViewMode], [scrollMode], and [spreadMode],
• and updates to pdf.js 3.10 in the stable branch and to pdf.js 3.11 in the bleeding-edge branch.
• The bleeding-edge branch, in turn, gives you a sneak preview of the new "stamp" editor, which allows you to add images to PDF files.

A slightly modified layout is a side-effect of the improvements of the toolbar and the secondary menu. Most people won't notice, but if you're using screenshot tests, expect them to break.

The updated find API brings a couple of breaking changes. I removed the fuzzy search, the multiple words-search, and the current page / page range search. "Ignore accent" now is "match diacritics." When you migrate your code, you'll have to invert your boolean logic because "ignore accents" is the opposite of "match diacritics". Along the way, I noticed that the find API didn't work as expected. I fixed several bugs and added more fields to the events. If you rely on the old events, brace yourself for (minor) breaking changes. Plus, I've renamed, moved, and even removed a couple of classes to make the new file structure match the simplified find bar.

The breaking changes became nessary because maintaining the library became more time-consuming with each version of pdf.js. Even worse, the pdf.js team worked heavily on the find algorithm, but I wasn't able to merge their improvements during the last one or two years. So I had to reduce the differences between the libraries. In other words, I pruned ngx-extended-pdf-viewer. I'm positive I've finished pruning, so in the future, there will be fewer breaking changes. Please apologize for the inconvenience!

If you need the old extended find bar, please stick to version 17. I've split off a separate branch, so I can maintain version 17 in parallel for a while.

A small breaking change affects single-page mode. I've removed a CSS rule that pushed the page to the left. If you don't like the page to be centered, you can add the CSS rules in your global style.css:

.pdfViewer.singlePageView .page {
  margin: 0;
}

Full changelog

There's also a detailed changelog.

Showcase and manual

There's a showcase at https://pdfviewer.net. Check this page for live demos, source code examples, and a handbook.

Contributors welcome!

Would you like to participate in a popular open source-project? It's easy: just open a ticket so we can discuss the change, create a fork, and send me a pull request. Contributions to the showcase are as welcome as contributions to the core library.

Features

• programmatic API for many features, such as searching
• Editor: add text, images, or free-style drawings to your PDF file.
• Printing
• Drag and drop PDF files to the viewer
• Support for forms, including two-way binding
• XFA forms are also supported (with a few limitations)
• (Limited) support for signatures (lacking verification of the signature, so use at your own risk!)
• Sidebar with thumbnails, outlines, and attachments (each of them is both optional and customizable)
• Rotating pages
• Download (including form data) and upload
• Zoom (with optional two-way binding to an attribute)
• Full-screen mode
• Book mode with animated page-turn animations
• Single page mode (supporting giant PDF documents of 30000+ pages)
• Infinite scrolling
• Plus several other approaches to scrolling (vertical, horizontal, "wrapped" scrolling)
• A wide range of event listeners
• Internationalization (providing translations to several dozen languages)
• Direct access to the core API of pdf.js (including TypeScript definition files)
• The ability to hide every button, menu item, and the context menu
• Responsive design that even includes your custom toolbars
• Color theming

Not to mention the ability to display PDF files, running on a customized version of Mozilla's pdf.js 3.10, released in late August 2023. If you're the daring one, you can also use the developer version 3.11. It's bleeding edge, so use it at your own risk. Basically, the bleeding edge version helps me because I can add Mozilla's latest improvements in frequent, tiny increments. But every once in a while, it contains a feature you may need, so feel free to use it. I don't encourage using the "bleeding edge" branch in production, but the quality is usually production-ready.

Alternatives

Even I have to admit my pet project doesn't match every requirement. There are several alternatives out there. Feel free to expand the description to learn what other developers have in store for you:

There's also a direct counterpart to my library: ng2-pdfjs-viewer. As far as I can see, it's also a good library. As of May 2021, it's running on PDF.js 2.2.171. It wraps the PDF viewer in an iFrame. That's a more reliable approach, but it also offers fewer options. The list of attributes is shorter, and the PDF viewer can't emit events to your application. If you're not happy with my library, check out ng2-pdfjs-viewer. It's a good library, too. Its unique selling point is displaying multiple PDF files simultaneously on the same page.

You might also try to use the native PDF viewer of your browser. That's a valid approach. It's even the preferred approach. However, ngx-extended-pdf-viewer gives you a wide range of options that aren't available using the native API.

How to use the library

As a rule of thumb, I recommend cloning the showcase project from GitHub before doing anything else. It's a standard Angular CLI application, so you'll get it up and running in less than ten minutes. It's a good starting point to do your experiments. Maybe even more important: you'll learn whether the library works on your machine. (Of course, it does, but it's always good to double-check!)

Currently, the minimum required version is Angular 12. The idea is to support the four most current versions of Angular, which gives you roughly two years to update. However, supporting so many versions isn't always possible.

1. run npm add ngx-extended-pdf-viewer and accept all the defaults
2. There's an example component, but it isn't yet part of your application. You can either add the example component to your application or copy the relevant line to your HTML template:

<ngx-extended-pdf-viewer [src]="'assets/example.pdf'" useBrowserLocale="true"></ngx-extended-pdf-viewer>

If you're running a non-standard configuration, have a look at the getting-started page" of the showcase.

Configuration, options, and events

See the attribute list on the showcase and the list of default options page. The lists have become too long to put them here: 87 @Input() attributes, 25 event emitters, and 50 default options, give or take a few.

Missing a configuration option? File an issue on the project bug tracker. If your request makes sense to me and if I can implement it in my (limited) leisure time, I'll add it. BTW, you can speed up the process by providing a code snippet telling me how to implement the feature or by submitting a pull request.

Searching programmatically

The service NgxExtendedPdfViewerService offers a programmatic API for searching, printing, dealing with layers, and scrolling within the page.

Internationalization

Slow default way

If you add the translation files to your project as described above in step 3, the PDF viewer uses the browser language setting to determine which language to load. First, it loads the locale.properties, scans it for the desired language files, and loads the language file from the corresponding folder. That's two additional HTTP calls.

Don't forget to set the attribute useBrowserLocale="true" if you follow this approach.

Slow way with custom translation files

If you want to use the slow way but prefer to load the language files from a different URL, add a link to your application like so:

<link rel="resource" type="application/l10n" href="https://www.example.com/locale/locale.properties" />

In this case, don't set useBrowserLocale (or set it explicitly to false).

Inlining (aka embedding) the language files

Alternatively, you can provide the translations as a Json file. This Json file has to be part of an HTML page. That's especially useful if you need only one or two languages. To get familiar with this approach, embed the Json file in the index.html like so:

<script type="application/l10n">
  {"default_locale":"de","locales":{"de": ... }}
</script>

The folder node_modules/ngx-extended-pdf-viewer/assets/inline-locale-files contains snippet files you can copy into your HTML page.

Hint: You can add the language definition in an arbitrary HTML file. The bottom line is that the HTML snippet is already part of the DOM when the PDF viewer is initialized. Cluttering the root index file with the translations is an ugly and inflexible hack, but it works.

If you use the "inline" approach, don't set useBrowserLocale (or set it explicitly to false).

Troubleshooting

See https://github.com/stephanrauh/ngx-extended-pdf-viewer/tree/main/projects/ngx-extended-pdf-viewer/troubleshooting.md

Feedback, pull requests, and bug reports

Pull requests and bug reports are welcome. Please send them to the bug tracker of the project page: https://github.com/stephanrauh/ngx-extended-pdf-viewer/issues

Building the library from scratch (and updating to the latest version of Mozilla's pdf.js)

Have a look at this walkthrough.

License and Kudos

The license of the ngx-extended-pdf-viewer is the Apache V2 license.

The library is based on https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js, which has been published under an Apache V2 license.

Some of the default icons have been published under a SIL Open Font License 1.1 license at Material Design Icons. The other icons have either been published under an Apache V2 license by Google or by the pdf.js team at Mozilla.

Thanks to the awesome pdf.js team and all the users who've reported bugs and even sent me pull requests!

Internet Explorer 11 is no longer supported

Reluctantly, I have to drop support for Internet Explorer 11. The base library, Mozilla's pdf.js, now generates binaries no longer compatible with Internet Explorer 11, and it seems there's no easy fix. That's a pity because IE11 support was the original use-case of the library and because I frequently get messages from developers who need IE11 support. The last version known to be compatible is 5.3. Version 7.3.2 should be compatible, too, but a user reported crashes.

Changelog

See https://github.com/stephanrauh/ngx-extended-pdf-viewer/tree/main/projects/ngx-extended-pdf-viewer/changelog.md