pdfjs-dist

What is pdfjs-dist?

The pdfjs-dist package is a pre-built version of the PDF.js library, which is a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering PDFs. It allows you to display PDF files in your web pages without the need for a native PDF reader. The package provides a wide range of features including, but not limited to, rendering PDFs, reading PDF metadata, and interacting with PDF content programmatically.

What are pdfjs-dist's main functionalities?

Rendering PDF pages to a canvas element

This code sample demonstrates how to render the first page of a PDF to a canvas element in the browser. It uses the getDocument method to load the PDF and the getPage method to access a specific page, then renders it to the provided canvas context.

const pdfjsLib = require('pdfjs-dist/legacy/build/pdf.js');

async function renderPage(url, canvasContext) {
  const pdf = await pdfjsLib.getDocument(url).promise;
  const page = await pdf.getPage(1);
  const viewport = page.getViewport({ scale: 1.5 });
  const renderContext = {
    canvasContext: canvasContext,
    viewport: viewport
  };
  await page.render(renderContext).promise;
}

Extracting text from a PDF page

This code sample shows how to extract text content from the first page of a PDF. It retrieves the text items from the page and then maps them to strings, joining them to form the full text content of the page.

const pdfjsLib = require('pdfjs-dist/legacy/build/pdf.js');

async function extractTextFromPage(url) {
  const pdf = await pdfjsLib.getDocument(url).promise;
  const page = await pdf.getPage(1);
  const textContent = await page.getTextContent();
  return textContent.items.map(item => item.str).join(' ');
}

Other packages similar to pdfjs-dist

pdf-parse

pdf-parse is a package that provides functionality to extract text from PDF files. It is similar to pdfjs-dist in its text extraction capabilities but does not include the ability to render PDFs to a canvas element.

pdf-lib

pdf-lib is a package that allows you to create, modify, and sign PDF documents in any JavaScript environment. While pdfjs-dist focuses on rendering and reading PDFs, pdf-lib provides more features for manipulating PDF files, such as adding pages, drawing shapes, and inserting images.

README

PDF.js

PDF.js is a Portable Document Format (PDF) library that is built with HTML5. Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering PDFs.

This is a pre-built version of the PDF.js source code. It is automatically generated by the build scripts.

For usage with older browsers or environments, without support for modern features such as e.g. async/await, ReadableStream, optional chaining, nullish coalescing, and private class fields/methods; please see the legacy folder.

See https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js for learning and contributing.