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

code.google.com

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

#21

Post by zobzu »

comex wrote: post #16
azakai wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it wouldn't make sense for Firefox to adopt this: 1. It is tied to v8 (PDFs can run JS, this PDF viewer uses v8 do so - see CJS_Context::RunScript etc), so it would mean bundling 2 JS engines, with all the security downsides of that. 2. This is written in C++. You can sandbox C++ in various ways, but that would still increase the surface area of the browser, compared to pdf.js which only uses things normal web…

Well, Chrome could make this viewer not increase the surface area of the browser just by changing it to a NaCl plugin. After all, it already exposes the ability to run native code inside NaCl to the web. ;p I like the concept of pdf.js, but it's still significantly slower, and thus provides a worse experience to the user, than native viewers.

i dont know, on recent computers, more often than not i dont really see a diff between pdf.js and others as a user.

it seems to only be an issue on really heavy pdfs, which are pretty rare

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

#22

Post by e12e »

reedlaw wrote: 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.

I don't really mind pdfjs being slow (it's not really slow enough that I've noticed) -- but it has some serious issues with printing/fonts (not sure quite which) -- even for "simple" pdfs from latex source (your typical paper or math homework) I've had to print from Adobe Acrobat (and, I think evince is also better -- but it's been a long while since I've printed from Linux -- for entirely unrelated reasons).

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

#23

Post by hendzen »

ksec wrote: post #18

Why did they close down something like Google Reader and Not Google Code Hosting? Do anyone actually use it? I wish they could either make Google Code decent or simply kill it and use GitHub instead. Is this a new implementation? Of did Foxit release it as Open Source?

Google code is heavily used internally at Google.

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

#24

Post by yarrel »

azakai wrote: post #14
reedlaw wrote: 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.

Well, it wouldn't make sense for Firefox to adopt this: 1. It is tied to v8 (PDFs can run JS, this PDF viewer uses v8 do so - see CJS_Context::RunScript etc), so it would mean bundling 2 JS engines, with all the security downsides of that. 2. This is written in C++. You can sandbox C++ in various ways, but that would still increase the surface area of the browser, compared to pdf.js which only uses things normal web…

4. It's not proprietary and doesn't restrict people's ability to freely use their web browser.

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

#25

Post by TwoBit »

reedlaw wrote: 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.

99% of the PDFs I read work fine with the pdf.js reader, and I feel a bit more safe using it than a binary reader.

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

#27

Post by iamsalman »

ksec wrote: post #18

Why did they close down something like Google Reader and Not Google Code Hosting? Do anyone actually use it? I wish they could either make Google Code decent or simply kill it and use GitHub instead. Is this a new implementation? Of did Foxit release it as Open Source?

It shows that the original code was Foxit's so would that mean that Foxit released the code or did Google purchase code rights and then decided to open source? Anyways, why would they host it on Google code?

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

#28

Post by Jyaif »

zobzu wrote: post #21
comex wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Chrome could make this viewer not increase the surface area of the browser just by changing it to a NaCl plugin. After all, it already exposes the ability to run native code inside NaCl to the web. ;p I like the concept of pdf.js, but it's still significantly slower, and thus provides a worse experience to the user, than native viewers.

i dont know, on recent computers, more often than not i dont really see a diff between pdf.js and others as a user. it seems to only be an issue on really heavy pdfs, which are pretty rare

Think mobile.

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

#29

Post by NicoJuicy »

ksec wrote: post #18

Why did they close down something like Google Reader and Not Google Code Hosting? Do anyone actually use it? I wish they could either make Google Code decent or simply kill it and use GitHub instead. Is this a new implementation? Of did Foxit release it as Open Source?

Not everything should move to GitHub (although i prefer GitHub also)

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

#30

Post by chilledheart »

hidamon wrote: post #17
yincrash wrote: 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?

https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/+/master/fpdfsdk/incl... "Original code copyright 2014 Foxit Software Inc. http://www.foxitsoftware.com"

What about this one ?

https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/+/master/core/src/fxg...

"/\ * * Copyright (c) 1998-2000, Microsoft Corp. All Rights Reserved. * * Module Name: * * Gdiplus.h * * Abstract: * * GDI+ Native C++ public header file * \/ "

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