PDF Rendering

[knowtheory]

In browser access to PDF internals should be possible through pdf.js. Firefox relies on pdf.js as it's main PDF display toolkit, and so we can rely on the repo being battle hardened enough to reliably access and render PDF internals.

pdf.js renders pdf pages to an HTML Canvas element, which is a requirement for our fallback layout analysis strategy.

pdf.js isn't trivial to integrate unfortunately, but this is ground that's trod well enough that there are other examples we can follow. By default pdf.js isn't set up to be used as an es6 import. Regretfully, Mozilla's instructions aren't super clear on how to integrate it, and it appears that pdf.js is set up to use CommonJS modules. There's a ticket about this.

There's a react-pdf library which wraps pdf.js and explains how they integrate pdf.js's workers.

We're importing the pdf.js core directly into the main app bundle to provide our ability to manipulate PDFs from the app.

[knowtheory]

After fighting with PDF.js and Rollup for while, I have the pdf.js worker in a deployable state, and a rendering demo set up.