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 async/await, 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.