Live data from Hacker News

PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source

code.google.com

1–10 of 106 posts

Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source

#5
I thought Chromium's PDF engine was based on Foxit; did they change that?

EDIT: I see there are Foxit employees in the commit list. Well, that explains that!

Anyway this is great news. Kudos Google.

By the way, for those confused, the source is not on svn like Google Code fails to communicate but on https://pdfium.googlesource.com/.

Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source

#7
post #4

This is good news because it renders PDFs a lot faster and better than pdf.js that Firefox uses. Also, I would have to install this binary blob to get Chromium to render PDFs. It seems Chromium could easily adopt this, but I'm not sure about Firefox.

Kpartsplugin with Okular also render PDFs faster in Firefox than pdf.js. I'd expect that all native plugins should be faster (if they are well written).

Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source

#8
post #2

It's really interesting to see that there are foxit employees on the list of committers. I assume that means that it was initially a fork of the foxit PDF reader?

Foxit isn't open-source, so I don't think it would be legal to release a derivative under the BSD license (IANAL).
Post reply on HN