So, it can run on any device that has a JavaScript runtime. For example, you can do PDF splitting and merging, and you can extract a page, annotate a pdf document, add an outline, and many more things you can imagine. You can do a lot of PDF modifications with this library. This package has robust support for modifying an existing document. You can generate a new PDF document dynamically with this package as per your need. Unlike the previous pdfjs package, pdf-lib is mainly used for PDF creation and manipulation. If you are not convinced enough, play with this library for some time and you will surely fall in love with it. They have a lot of tutorials for getting started with the library. If you want to make a custom PDF viewer for your site, probably this is the package you are searching for.

Other PDF modification features are very limited with this package. The core strength of this package is PDF rendering on a web page. When you view a PDF in Firefox, the PDF viewer is made with this pdfjs package. pdfjs is a web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering PDFs. This package is made by Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser. You can find all of these packages in the npm registry. I found a bunch of PDF libraries after searching for an hour or so, and these are my best picks.Īll the packages listed here are free and open-source packages. One is for PDF rendering and the other is for PDF manipulation (or modification). I've discovered two main types of PDF libraries in JavaScript. I hope you're excited to see the results. So these are all the steps we'll go through here. Finally, we'll download the new PDF for later use.Then we'll render the new PDF (that we made in the 2nd step) inside the browser.The extracted pages will make a new PDF document. Next we'll load an existing PDF and extract some pages from it.

Then we'll compare them and find the best package that suits our requirements. First, we'll explore some popular PDF packages out there for PDF-related work in JavaScript.Here is a live demo of what you will build during this tutorial. The PDF Viewer Project You Will Build in this Tutorial A screenshot of the PDF viewer you'll build Why JavaScript? Because it has some pretty decent PDF packages available, and people like it. In this article, we'll explore all the popular PDF-related libraries in JavaScript. Unfortunately, the available software meant for PDFs often falls short of your specialized requirements.īut you are a programmer, right? Why not make some software that helps the PDF work as you want it to? Well, this is the inspiration for this article. They are self-contained documents with support for nearly all major operating systems.īut sometimes you'll need to modify a PDF to suit your needs and not just view it. PDFs were designed by Adobe in the 90s for Windows.

How to open a pdf on pages