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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

#41

Post by ksec »

iamsalman wrote: post #27
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?

That is the point. If Foxit opened it up then they deserve some credit. Otherwise the web is going to publish this as another Google PR without acknowledging their work.

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

#42

Post by ksec »

iamsalman wrote: post #27
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?

That is the point. If Foxit opened it up then they deserve some credit. Otherwise the web is going to publish this as another Google PR without acknowledging their work.

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

#43

Post by ksec »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #29
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)

I know. I dont want everything to be in GitHub either. It could even be BitBucket. The point is Google Code is so terrible that i refuse to even look at it for more then a minutes.

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

#45

Post by emn13 »

pjmlp wrote: post #36
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…

Yeah, but with Chrome reading PDFs is almost like seeing a normal web page, whereas with pdf.js my i7 jumps to 100% CPU usage. In any case, I use a native viewer, which provides the best overall user experience.

That's really weird - I use pdf.js all the time, and suffer no such issues.

In particular, I enjoy it's superior font rendering (compared to the chrome implementation). I really don't get why chrome (on windows anyhow) has fairly fuzzy fonts while rendering pdf - noticably worse than pdf.js or acrobat.

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

#46

Post by espadrine »

v413 wrote: post #40
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…

How about converting this viewer through Emscripten using asm.js. Would be interesting to see performance comparison with pdf.js :)

Especially on Firefox. The product would be asm.js…

On the other hand, there might be an initial compilation pause when starting to load the PDF.

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

#48

Post by pjmlp »

emn13 wrote: post #45
pjmlp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but with Chrome reading PDFs is almost like seeing a normal web page, whereas with pdf.js my i7 jumps to 100% CPU usage. In any case, I use a native viewer, which provides the best overall user experience.

That's really weird - I use pdf.js all the time, and suffer no such issues. In particular, I enjoy it's superior font rendering (compared to the chrome implementation). I really don't get why chrome (on windows anyhow) has fairly fuzzy fonts while rendering pdf - noticably worse than pdf.js or acrobat.

The rest of the world seems to have similar experience with mine, if you check the threads at this other HN story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7716022

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

#49

Post by icebraining »

pjmlp wrote: post #48
emn13 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really weird - I use pdf.js all the time, and suffer no such issues. In particular, I enjoy it's superior font rendering (compared to the chrome implementation). I really don't get why chrome (on windows anyhow) has fairly fuzzy fonts while rendering pdf - noticably worse than pdf.js or acrobat.

The rest of the world seems to have similar experience with mine, if you check the threads at this other HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7716022

It happens to me too on Debian, yet PDF.js works fine on my Nexus 7 (2012) table, even though the i7 is much faster than the Tegra 3. It's probably an hardware rendering issue.

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

#50

Post by lvillani »

e98cuenc wrote: post #3

In case the authors are lurking here, what are the main differences between this and poppler?

For us, that would be the license. BSD is far more palatable than GPL (LGPL would be fine) when we have to embed a PDF viewer in a client's project.
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