ngx-extended-pdf-viewer
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Embedding PDF files in your Angular application. Highly configurable viewer including the toolbar, sidebar, and all the features you're used to.
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:
Version 19 updates to pdf.js 4.0, and that means breaking changes. I hope most of you won't even notice it, but under the hood, there's a lot of change. So I decided to do a bold step and update ngx-extended-pdf-viewer to Angular 17.
My promise of backward compatibility to roughly 3-4 version still holds, so I'm going to maintain version 18 for a while. I also hope that version 19 is compatible to Angular 14, 15, and 16, but at the moment, it's too early to promise anything.
In a nutshell:
Breaking changes of version 19:
useBrowserLocale and the inlined translations are gone.In November 2023, the pdf.js team have published version 4.0.269, but the developer version still has the version number 4.0.x. So I suspect verson 4.0.269 is an intermediate release.
The bleeding edge branch is the latest developer version of pdf.js (usually one to three weeks behind). In theory, this means it might be buggy, but the pdf.js teams manage to deliver a remarkable high quality. Most of the bugs of the bleeding-edge version are my bugs, usually caused by merging, and that's also the reason why I maintain this branch. It helps me to spot bugs early. I'm always happy when people use the bleeding-edge branch and report errors, as long as you keep in mind it's not intended to be used in production.
As mentioned above, I'll maintain version 18 for a short while because version 19 requires Angular 17 or above. If you're using Angular 12-15, stick to ngx-extended-pdf-viewer 18, and if you're using Angular 16, my preliminary tests indicate you can use either version of ngx-extended-pdf-viewer.
Version 18 ships with quite a few improvements:
[pageViewMode], [scrollMode], and [spreadMode],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;
}
I've changed the ids of the "next" and "previous" buttons, both in the primary toolbar and the secondary menu. Plus, I've fixed a bug that prevented the pagination buttons to show in the secondary menu. Strictly speaking, this is a breaking change, but it's so small I decided to call it minor version update.
To my surprise, form support is broken in version 18.0.0-18.0.3. That's a high-priority ticket, so it should be history soon. Nonethless, it shows that version 18 does add several new (and unexpected) bugs. Have a look at the bug tracker before updating.
The last two versions brought a lot of breaking changes, some of them very annoying to users relying on them. I'm sorry about that. I had to prune the library because progress of the base library has shyrocketed. It became next to impossible to keep up with the pace. The good news is now I'm confident I can keep up with the pace of the base library now. I don't expect new major breaking changes any time soon. Minor breaking changes - in particular, changes related to CSS - are always possible, but I'll try hard to avoid them.
There's also a detailed changelog.
There's a showcase at https://pdfviewer.net. Check this page for live demos, source code examples, and a handbook.
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.
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.
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.
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.
npm add ngx-extended-pdf-viewer and accept all the defaults<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.
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.
The service NgxExtendedPdfViewerService offers a programmatic API for searching, printing, dealing with layers, and scrolling within the page.
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.
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).
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).
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
Have a look at this walkthrough.
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!
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.
FAQs
Embedding PDF files in your Angular application. Highly configurable viewer including the toolbar, sidebar, and all the features you're used to.
The npm package ngx-extended-pdf-viewer receives a total of 73,379 weekly downloads. As such, ngx-extended-pdf-viewer popularity was classified as popular.
We found that ngx-extended-pdf-viewer demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
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