PDFJS Express is a powerful JavaScript-based PDF Library that wraps PDF.js. It provides a slick out-of-the-box responsive UI that interacts with the core library to view, annotate and manipulate PDFs that can be embedded into any web project.
This version of the product is a PDF Viewer (no annotations) and is available to use for free. Get your free license on your PDF.js Express Dashboard.
1) Install PDFJS Express
npm i @pdftron/pdfjs-express-viewer --save
This will also download all the assets that need to be included for PDFJS Express to work.
2) Copy assets and resources to your public/static folder
These assets need to be served with your application. For example, if your project is built into a dist folder, you could copy these assets into dist/public.
The folder you need to copy is node_modules/@pdftron/pdfjs-express-viewer/public.
cp -R ./node_modules/@pdftron/pdfjs-express-viewer/public ./dist
We recommend using a module bundler like Webpack to automatically do this for you. There is a nice plugin called copy-webpack-plugin that does just this.
3) Import and instantiate WebViewer
import WebViewer from '@pdftron/pdfjs-express-viewer'
const element = document.getElementById('viewer');
WebViewer({
path: '/public', // point to where the files you copied are served from
initialDoc: 'https://pdftron.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/pl/PDFTRON_about.pdf' // path to your document
}, element).then((instance) => {
// Call APIs here
})Full documentation for PDFJS Express can be found here.