This is great because it is now the best open-source PDF rendering library. GhostScript, Poppler, XPdf, pdf.js -- they all sort of work alright, but are pathetic compared to FoxIt, on which this source code is based. What we now have with this source is a high performance highly compliant clean codebase of C++ PDF rendering code. Excellent news. Expect lots of future PDF innovations to be based on this.
PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source
51–60 of 106 posts
Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source
#52Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source
#53I found it interesting that it seems to use Antigrain by Maxim Shemanarev in https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/+/master/core/src/fxg... (Chrome uses Skia). Unfortunately the author of Antigrain died: http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/3154635/rip-maxim-sheman...
It's nice to see the fascinating Antigrain code to be used for PDF viewing every day!
Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source
#54Just glanced the source code, and, isn't it bad to “#include "../../../sth.h"”? Wouldn't it be better to set the include path while compiling and just “#include "sth.h"”?
Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source
#55This 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…
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Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source
#56Why 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?
What's wrong with Google Code? I'm not telling that it is decent in any way, but it is usable. The repository hosting is there, the wiki is there, some sort of issue-tracking is there. And, if I were a Google employee, I'd rather use my companies code hosting than some others, because what if those lot get interested in founding a tea-shop?
Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source
#57Earlier 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 :)
Yes. And you could leave out support for PDF-embedded JS for this purpouse.
Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source
#58So, apparently somebody still uses Google Code.¨
edit: .... just not for the actual code.
Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source
#59This is great because it is now the best open-source PDF rendering library. GhostScript, Poppler, XPdf, pdf.js -- they all sort of work alright, but are pathetic compared to FoxIt, on which this source code is based. What we now have with this source is a high performance highly compliant clean codebase of C++ PDF rendering code. Excellent news. Expect lots of future PDF innovations to be based on this.
I've had by far the best performance with Sumatra, which is open source but unfortunately Windows-only. I try Chrome's PDF reader once every few months, hoping it'll improve, but I always disable it when I see it's still disappointingly sluggish.
Re: PDFium: Chrome’s PDF rendering engine is now open-source
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Foxit isn't open-source, so I don't think it would be legal to release a derivative under the BSD license (IANAL).
It's perfectly legal for Foxit to license their own software to Google to be released under the terms of the BSD license. This would be with Foxit's consent, of course.
Right, and probably some money changing hands.