PDF.js is a Portable Document Format (PDF) viewer that is built with HTML5.

PDF.js is community-driven and supported by Mozilla. Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering PDFs.

PDF.js is an open source project and always looking for more contributors. To get involved, visit:

Feel free to stop by our Matrix room for questions or guidance.

Please note that the "Modern browsers" version assumes native support for features such as async/await, optional chaining, nullish coalescing, and private class fields/methods.

Modern browsers: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html

Older browsers: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/legacy/web/viewer.html

PDF.js is built into version 19+ of Firefox.

To get a local copy of the current code, clone it using git:

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):

If everything worked out, install all dependencies for PDF.js:

Finally, you need to start a local web server as some browsers do not allow opening PDF files using a file:// URL. Run:

and then you can open:

Please keep in mind that this requires a modern and fully up-to-date browser; refer to Building PDF.js for non-development usage of the PDF.js library.

It is also possible to view all test PDF files on the right side by opening:

In order to bundle all src/ files into two production scripts and build the generic viewer, run:

If you need to support older browsers, run:

This will generate pdf.js and pdf.worker.js in the build/generic/build/ directory (respectively build/generic-legacy/build/). 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.

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.

PDF.js is hosted on several free CDNs:

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:

The API documentation can be found at:

Check out our FAQs and get answers to common questions:

Talk to us on Matrix:

File an issue:

Follow us on twitter: @pdfjs