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Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling
334 points by niknikson on April 2, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 132 comments
Hi HN,

Nick here. We're super excited to officially launch PDF.js Express [1].

PDF.js Express wraps a modern React UI around the PDF.js rendering engine to enable PDF annotation, form filling, and signing inside your web app. We've also made some improvements to PDF.js text search, and taken a different approach to how the viewer uses the PDF.js rendering API, resulting in sharp graphics at any zoom magnification [2].

Based on our research, more than 70% of those who try to implement these features on top of PDF.js find it too difficult or time-intensive [3]. For those who are successful, supporting the new functionality is also challenging. To help these developers in achieving their short-term goals, and to support them as their needs evolve, we built PDF.js Express.

Check out the demo and let us know what you think or if you have any questions [4].

If you're helping fight COVID-19, it's free [5].

[1] https://pdfjs.express/blog/introducing-pdfjs-express

[2] https://pdfjs.express/pdfjs-vs-express

[3] https://pdfjs.express/blog/build-vs-buy

[4] https://pdfjs.express/demo

[5] https://pdfjs.express/blog/pdfjs-express-free-to-those-fight...




I spent about three years building the support for PDF into my graphics editor https://www.Photopea.com .

While other editors "add stuff on top of PDF", Photopea "chews through" each byte of a PDF, and tries to make as much sense of it as possible.

You can rewrite the existing text (with the same formatting), edit bézier curves, edit gradient fills. You can edit bitmaps on a pixel level. You can see the parameters as CSS or export it into an SVG.

Also, it is free. People open about 150,000 PDF files a month in it, but I hope it will get more popular in the future.

Demo PDF: https://www.photopea.com/api/img2/WEBSITE-ZLONIN-uprava.pdf

Photopea: https://www.photopea.com#%7B%22files%22:%5B%22https://www.ph... (press T and click into the text to edit it)


Wow that's insane. It never would have even occurred to me to use Photopea for editing PDF's.

But it does indeed import each element of the PDF as a separate layer, and you have PDF export with options to leave text as-is, rasterize text, or vectorize it.

Two questions:

1) Does it set the resolution of the Photopea file, and the default resolution to re-export the PDF, to trying to detect the original resolution of images in the PDF? So that by importing and exporting, you're going to have a PDF of approximately the same quality and filesize?

2) Are you able to handle embedded fonts, including subsetted fonts? I assume that in that case you would vectorize it and wouldn't be able to type new characters... just want to know if I'm wrong in assuming that?

Thanks again a million times over for Photopea. It remains my absolute #1 inspiration of what one developer on their own can do. Never ceases to amaze. :)


1) In a PDF file, the measure units are Inches. The page size is in inches. Any dimension is in Inches. There can be a bitmap having 200x200 pixels placed at 3x3 inches. Next to it can be a bitmap of 5x5 pixels placed at 5x5 inches.

That means, that PDF does not contain any DPI information. It is not needed at all. PDF rasterizer (e.g. a raster printer) can render it at any DPI. Photopea decodes and saves back bitmaps inside PDF in the original resolution. The rest is vector graphics.

2) For now, Photopea ignores embedded fonts. But it extracts the font name and in 98 % of cases, we already have the required font in our database of fonts, so we can render it identically.


Don't you mean points, not inches?

That's why page dimensions are things like "/CropBox [0.0 0.0 595.27576 841.89001]". PDF points are the same as Postscript points, 1/72 of an inch, that is 25.4/72 mm. So those numbers mean a page 210mm wide and 297mm high: A4.


Yes, the actual values are points, and one point is 1/72 of an inch, which is the same, as if the values were in inches. I just wanted to point out, that the units are physical (unlike "logical" units in an SVG or in a webpage).


I absolutely love Photopea. Thank you for making it. It's my number 1 go to Photoshop alternative.

Any chance you will package it for desktop? It would be great for Linux.


As a random user my thought is that as a PWA it's already desktop worthy in any environment, but I must agree that the average user does not know what a PWA is and how to use it.

Perhaps packaging it with electron could be an option, but it's an additional burden (I know by experience) that I'm not so sure is worth it.


Wow. I've just done a couple of things that are very hard or next to impossible with Acrobat DC in Photopea without so much as hitch. Amazing Work!


I had no idea. This is revelation. I am thinking that if more people knew about these features you would have 10 times that a month!


Photopea is a masterpiece. Thank you for building this thing.


Wow. Sounds like you seriously need a separate landing page marketing Photopea as an advanved pdf editor.


It is written right when you open Photopea.com :D https://i.imgur.com/zgX380J.png


It mades me laughed.


Wow nice. I was just about to cancel my Photoshop subscription because 1) I hate subscription pricing models and 2) I'm using it mostly just to resize images.

Nice to see that you have the Photoshop UI there so I don't have to relearn anything.


I understand a professional not wanting to learn a new UI for something as complex as graphics editing, but if you are admittedly mostly using it to resize images, I can't imagine why any other tool, including the infamous Gimp, would be so hard to "learn"?


I think I was overstating the extent to which I only use it for resizing photos.


Why not use Preview? For most things, like resizing and cropping, and rotating, it just works


It doesn't do compression or format conversions.


It does do some format conversion and have some support for compression settings (if I understand you correctly). Under the File -> Export menu you can choose between some formats [0] and when applicable choose compression level, e.g for JPEG.

[0]: On my machine: HEIC, JPEG, JPEG-2000, OpenEXR, PDF, PNG, TIFF


Dude, this is incredibly awesome! I've never heard of it even though this is something I've been looking for for a long time. I bet your software can get extremely popular if you can market it better.

I've immediately posted it on HN (hopefully I won't be downvoted just for linking my own post).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22791151


Just wanted to say thank you for Photopea. It is brilliant!


This is actually great! For many (but not all) files works much better than pdf editing in Inkscape which I was using up to today.

Two suggestions: 1. Make it clear to users why install button is greyed out. I know it, but most won't. 2. Allow login with any oauth provider, not everyone likes to be tracked across the web


Awesome feature!

Is there a way to change resolution during editing? When I zoom in in Photopea, I can see individual pixels of text characters. With some PDFs pixels show up sooner, making text barely readable during editing.


The preview in Photopea is always rasterized (pixelated at a certain zoom). But you can increase the resolution in Image - Image Size.


I literally needed this just a few hrs ago and instead had to resort to a free trial of adobe reader pro (ugh). I’ll check this out for next time, looks great.


Woah! Thanks for your amazing work. It never occurred to me either to use photopea for this and I use photopea for all kinds of other tasks.


Just amazes me how much PhotoPea does and it is built by one person and work without intrusive ads. Great work and you are an inspiration.


Photopea is an incredible piece of software. Really thanks for it.


sorry for my dumb question, but i was looking to add a simple arrow. Can't find it. Where is it hiding? :) Thx


You can find a picture of an arrow online and copy-paste it into your document :) or you can draw your arrow with a Brush tool, or with a Pen tool, etc :)


dude.... this is insane


Some feedback.

Website design is poor. You could definitely do with a designer to make it look nicer.

$5000ish a year is a weird price point. It's too expensive for a hobbyist or small dev shop, but too cheap for an enterprise to buy (when you consider the time of working on procurement problems you'll experience).

You either need to make it cheap, like $200/yr, or much more expensive. Right now you are in no mans land.

You also have a * next to limited support on pricing page, but I can't see what that explains.

Offering no refunds is strange and your copy comes off passive aggressive about this. Why? As a new service I'd be all about offering full refunds with no questions asked. Most people don't ask for refunds, and you can learn very important information when they ask for one.

Terms page is very short and doesn't have a lot of terms I'd expect for a product charging $5k/yr.

Don't worry about it not being open source; that's fine.


I agree. As a person with direct experience building and leading top industry products in this field. It feels.. off. Signatures are one thing, but being ESIGN and UETA compliant is another. It's hard for me to in vision the niche this is fulfilling as it does more then pdfjs but not enough IMO to warrant buying/licensing it.


Yes, as a startup you can't afford $375 per month.


> Website design is poor. You could definitely do with a designer to make it look nicer.

Really, in what way? In my view it's clean and simple.

> You either need to make it cheap, like $200/yr, or much more expensive. Right now you are in no mans land.

Another unsubstantiated statement. How much market research have you done on PDF libraries?

Pricing is a sensitive topic and many factors play a role in it. Too many to be assessed by an armchair expert.

> Don't worry about it not being open source; that's fine.

Where did OP express any worries about it not being open source?


Nicely done!

For non-React users (and React users, for that matter), I started working on wrapping PDF.js up into a web component for use in any framework or in plain HTML or Markdown: https://www.npmjs.com/package/pdf-viewer-element

The idea is to make a `<pdf-viewer>` element that's as easy to use as if it were built-in to the browser.

As PDF.js Express shows, this is a pretty deep UI and feature area to tackle. My project is incomplete and doesn't have anywhere close to the features.

I think complex viewers are one of the ideal use cases for web components though. These components require a lot of work to do well, and we shouldn't have to re-implement them for every framework. The 3D gltf viewer, `<model-viewer>`[1] is another great example.

[1]: https://modelviewer.dev/


I'm all about the open core business model.. but are you guys affiliated with the core pdf.js team?

$440 / month is pretty hard to swallow. I love that you guys included a build vs buy section, but I think it's going to be difficult to land clients at this price point because higher end clients are more likely to choose the build vs buy option.

Anyhow, the product itself looks well structured. Congrats & best of luck.


Thanks for the feedback! We are not part of the core pdf.js team. In regards to pricing we found that for some companies creating their own viewer requires a fair amount of upfront resources - after trying to create their own viewers they realized the time to build and maintain was not economical. The other big consideration is the opportunity cost of sinking developer resources into a viewer that is not a core differentiator.


It's super misleading to call yourself "PDF.js Express" then. It sounds like a paid extension to PDF.js. You should rename the product.


Right there with you. This is straight up infringement and confusing for everyone involved. This should not be allowed in the slightest. Highly disingenuous for them to do this.


This is a commercially supported solution so the price is actually not bad ( given alternatives )


Says the employee of the company behind it!


This reminds me of the people who tried to sell Blender a couple of years ago [0].

[0] https://www.blendernation.com/2009/06/11/3dmagix-re-branding...


This appears to have significant amounts of functionality that the open source pdf.js does not.


Or Linux Red Hat, iText Lib ( open sourced but under AGPL) etc. There is tons of open-source out there under commercial terms.


Yeah but this isn't open source. It's proprietary with source available, despite what you claim in numerous places throughout this thread. You're building a proprietary product on top of an open source project. You also chose a name that creates the impression that you built the original open source project, which you don't appear to be contributing anything back to. Comparing yourselves to Red Hat has to be a joke, right?


No, Express will be available under dual AGPL/commercial license.


I have a startup and we are highly reliant on PDF rendering in our application. But here's the thing, Nik: your pricing model doesn't make sense to me. In general, most PDF SDK models don't make sense. I have searched a lot over the years, and am left consistently disappointed.

You charge the same amount to large commercial customers as you do to small startups, who are trying to save every penny. Even though I really value the technology you have built, you have not allowed us to "pay-as-we-go". I am not interested in your trial and the trials of your competitors because you don't allow me to start with a $5/month plan based on volume of usage. And so, we have resorted to writing the wrappers around PDFJS ourselves, slowly and steadily over months and years. Even though we might end up spending the same amount over 2 years by doing these things ourselves, at least we will understand the technology and own it perpetually.

Just charge us based on volume, so your revenue can align with our revenue. It will create much larger traction among small developers. If you are not targeting that audience, I understand, but I contend that most people on places like HN are that audience. Be more like Crocodoc (the company Box acquired). I really don't want us to keep reinventing the pieces here because this is not our core competency.


I want to say there was something that reached pretty high on the HN front page a few days ago that discussed SaaS pricing models and they made this exact same point! Aligning incentives between you and the customer just makes sense, as your comment clearly demonstrates!


Aligned incentives (we help you grow and succeed, we share the reward) has also come up in interviews and discussions as one of Stripe's greatest strengths.


The biggest challenge to pricing based on volume is the exercise of tracking usage. In a typical SAAS product determining usages is fairly linear. For PDF.js Express because you would be deploying from your environment we would not have an accurate way to measure usage. Fundamentally I agree with you - you should pay for what you use. Unfortunately at this time we are not able to implement that effectively. Also keep in mind for some organization the value created from this product will far outweigh the final price tag.


As a startup founder, here are a few alternatives that I would prefer.

1. Community edition - no direct support, maybe some enterprise features no available (like Sencha.com)

2. Hosted version - easier to PAYG with a lower price point per use (like Typekit)

3. One off purchases with updates for just 12 months. Updates then require licensing (like Sketch)

The other option is that you only got for enterprise and exclude the startup and indie developers. Enterprises tend to have no issue doing the right thing. If you're worried about smaller developers taking advantage, then you need to weigh up the long term benefits.

Just remember, if it's hard to do, it doesn't automatically make the wrong choice the right choice.


Good point. What if you have two models:

- One: the model you have right now. this is for organizations where the value outweighs the price tag.

- Two: Smaller organizations are generally also more willing to compromise on JS/asset bundling and performance. Why don't you give them: - a hosted JS solution where they just have to include a <script /> tag - An uglified script. I'd argue most JS developers can't unscramble these - you keep counters on number of requests - you disqualify (using some basic hashing method) run-ability of PDFJS Express based on the time the script was requested OR if an acknowledgement from a server fails. So say, if someone is using a cached version, the script will either not run at a certain point OR all the documents will be watermarked with "TRIAL".

This second way could also be the best way for getting people started immediately. Include a tag, see a watermark, but you are ready to go.


The watermarking is how Google Maps does it. It shows "development only" on the maps if the keys are not set up right or are over their limits.


What about doing something similar to JetBrains, where you offer the product at a significantly discounted rate to startups, rather than based on usage? You would have 1 new customer immediately.


Have you thought of turning your wrappers into a service/SaaS offering? Sounds valuable!!


Or open sourcing it?

This seems like one of those complex-enough areas that having multiple groups and companies contribute to a common good could really pay off for everyone.


I agree with both of you. Our wrappers are currently very tightly glued to the rest of the product, and have a lot of hacks (hint: PDFJS documentation is not very rich, they have barely touched their documentation since they came out). So what we have is in no good state to release, unfortunately :( But if someone does initiate serious work, we will jump in with our contributions.

But to your points: because there is no good open source initiative that does what PDFJS Express does, commercial providers like PDFJS Express and PSPDFKit are able to build pricy SaaS offerings.


I agree. I would definitely love to integrate (and improve) this as part of my SAAS product, and I would spend way more than $400/year in effort on it. However, I can't possibly use or buy this as is, because it isn't open source. For comparison, my company pays for the CodeMirror "moral license"...


$400/month is what PDFJS express is charging. $400/yr would have been a little difficult to swallow too, but this amount is just absurd for a product where most of the underlying technology is open-source.


Pdf.js Express is US$375/month, or US$4500/year.


No, it's $440 / month if you look at the actual pay-per-month option.


Wow. This will be a good example in GPL versus MIT license debates...


Actually express is already open sources ( see other messages ) and will be licensed under dual commercial/AGPL terms ... like iText ( bit.ly/2JD0Yj0 ), another popular PDF OSS


Actually it's NOT, you're quote "working on it". Stop spreading misinformation. Right now it's 100% commercially licensed in a public repo. Not open source in any way, shape, or form.


Yes! +1


FIle is here https://registry.npmjs.org/@pdftron/pdfjs-express/-/pdfjs-ex...

They bundle both a Apache 2.0 "PDFJS-LICENSE" AND a "PDF.js Express Evaluation License.pdf" which seem to conflict with each other.


I suspect that the Apache license is meant to only apply to the PDFJS source code, and the "... Evaluation License" applies to the minified/bundled pdfjs express code that's in there (but not actually human readable?). That's my guess.


I think you're right, but how is someone supposed to know which parts go with which? I guess \pdfjs-express-6.2.1\package\public\core\pdfjs is Apache 2.0 and everything else is commercial?


Hi Nick,

Congrats on your launch. Just wanted to tell you that there's another service called PDF eXpress that's in use for IEEE conferences to make sure the authors conform to the given template. I know it's not exactly the same name, but might be worth looking into viz. copyright or trademarks.

More info on PDF eXpress: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/pdfexpress.html


I work in an industry that marks up PDFs extensively (construction) and have wanted to build a bespoke PDF markup tool for a long time. In designing concrete floor slabs, we need to transfer information from our FEA software to a dwg. Currently a blank plan is printed, it’s marked up by hand, and then handed to a drafter to put back into the computer. It’s a very inefficient process. But all the SDKs are stupidly expensive (this one included). It’s really surprising there isn’t something open source, given the importance of PDF markup in many industries and businesses.


What's preventing this being done with a ipad, pencil, and a myriad of pdf viewer/markup apps out there?


I didn’t clarify that the tool needs to store the information so it can be imported into CAD, rather than just being hand scribbled lines and numbers.


Ahh gotcha. This should still be straight forward. Just don’t know of a generic format to export overlays/cordinates.

Everyone has a opinion on how this should be done and measured and there are different standards for pdf libraries and print etc. not complicated though.


That was my feeling as well - it’s not necessarily complicated, it’s just so niche as to not have anyone making it. Today I found this GitHub repo which I may try tinkering with on the weekend:

https://github.com/highkite/pdfAnnotate


yeah, main things are tracking overlay collision, groups like radio buttons, where you start your measurements from top left or bottom, dpi, and zoom levels. built systems for it using itext and websupergoo abcpdf. (backend for manipulating pdfs, tamper sealing etc.) and front end uses a image of the rendered pdf page that was extracted. This is a bit different from pdfjs but also scales well. PS pdf standards suck. :(


Libre Office Draw should be able to do this...


The form fill demo only prints a bitmap. Is that intentional? The quality is completely unacceptable.


Yes, unfortunately the printing is done with a bitmap because of the lack of browser APIs to print scalable canvas content. It looks like our default print quality is a bit on the low side though, so we'll probably change that. You can use the API to increase the quality as well https://pdfjs.express/api/WebViewerInstance.html#setPrintQua..., for example instance.setPrintQuality(2).


Well, capturing a 72 dpi screenshot and converting to JPEG (which more or less seems to be what you're doing) kind of makes the form filling pointless. Fillable PDF forms exist so they can be printed (or saved and then printed, which I don't think you have an option for either?)


The right way to handle this would be to work with pdf.js, which has been discussing pdf form printing for quite a long time[1],instead of rolling a canvas screenshot hack.

[1]https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/7613


The pricing of 440 USD/month must be an April's joke. It might be worth 9 USD/month compared the many competitors and free solutions.


RE: the "Extract & parse content" feature, does this mean you can parse and extract data from PDF documents like bank statements or invoices?


Hi mmckelvy, Co-Founder of konfuzio.com here. If you are looking for a tool to extract information from documents and download results via API or CSV ping me. You can train your custom AI Model using our PDF Annotation Tool. There is no coding required. Using your documents as training data you can go live within a few hours or use our pre-trained models. We don't have pricing plans on our homepage, as we mainly focus on large enterprises at the moment. But I would love to hear your feedback. Best Chris


We can extract text and form data -- we'll try to get some documentation around that in the next week or so.


"can" - easier said than done, especially tables.

I don't see it in the Demo. Did I miss it ?!


I don't think this solution is doing what you are looking for. To detect tables reliably in PDF you need some heavy-duty AI like https://www.pdftron.com/pdf-tools/pdf-table-extraction/


How would this compare to something like syncfusion pdf viewer - https://www.syncfusion.com/angular-ui-components/angular-pdf...

It handles chopping up the pdf into pieces on the server as well as storage of annotations and some other stuff. We just got done integrating this in to a big MEANS stack app and hit a ton of challenges both client side and server.

On the client side we wanted to customize the annotation dialogs which required a ton of hacking.( we upload images and video snippets and role based access to annotations. We wanted to load two PDFs side by side and sync scrolling (Notta). On the server we had to wrap their api in a proxy so we could store annotations in Elastic etc. it was great in a lot of ways but a ton of work in other areas.

Generally how do you compare?

How are viewer modifications handled?

Great job getting the product out the door. This is a great space.


This looks like a fantastic solution. If there were an affordable price point, I would immediately implement this in the edtech platform that we're developing, but the price point puts it completely out of our league for now. (Especially given the exchange rate fluctuations we see as developers in South Africa). Have you by any chance considered offering discounts to: 1. Educational institutions 2. Startups (eg. us) Offering a free tier to startups, or at a discounted rate would allow them to use the product and become entrenched, by which point the full license would become easily affordable.

Overall looks like a great solution, and definitely a gap in the market. On a side note, I hit the "Try for Free" button on the home page and got a 404.


COngrats Nick ! I've tested the fill pdf demo on latest FF on WIN10.

I cann add characters; but cannot remove them with DEL or RETURN keys cc https://ibb.co/zX4LQwL

Cheers


Hi Nick,

Your product looks pretty awesome. It's super polished for your initial launch! Congrats!

I'm curious how long it took to build the product and how large your team is? Do you have some initial customers?

I'm building a similar paid Javascript Library business (https://www.dropkiq.com/). I would love to connect if you want to share some ideas? Feel free to shoot me an email if you're interested: adam@dropkiq.com

Adam


> how large your team is?

https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui/graphs/contributors


Thanks for your feedback and your questions Adam! PDF.js Express has been in development since early 2019. We have a number of customers signed up and using it in production, and so far the feedback has been really positive. Your website looks great.


Just wanted to say that both Dropkiq and website to market it look fantastic. Really nice work.

If you're ever interested in licensing a version to work with custom grammars (not liquid), I'd be interested! (email: ted AT instabase.com)


Thanks, Ted! I appreciate the kind words.

I'll keep your email handy if we're able to help down the road with non-liquid grammars.


I almost feel like this should be a product that integrates with industry leading API's and be licensed as a better white label, then get those enterprises into maintenance contract. Lot of companies I have spoken to want to "own" the process all the way through and create a seamless "in their portal experience" for interacting with PDFS. (tagging/signing/SSO/workflow etc)


Wow, if only this was open source...


Yes, this announcement had me momentarily very excited until I realized that this is a proprietary offshoot and not a feature that had been added to PDF.js itself.


It's open source.


Their website and marketing of this fact (is it a fact?) is very confusing or misleading. The comparison at https://pdfjs.express/pdfjs-vs-express says "PDF.js is an open-source PDF library that was created by Mozilla in 2011 to let you open and render PDFs in web browsers using JavaScript. PDF.js Express is a fully-featured commercial PDF.js viewer with a modern and customizable UI."

I would really like to know whether or not "PDF.js Express" is open source. Why? Because I've done a lot of work on react + pdf.js already (for a latex editor), and it's been high on my todo list to add annotation features. So PDF.js express significantly overlaps with something I'm very seriously planning to do...


Evidently I should clarify that by "open source", I mean "released under an OSI approved license" (https://opensource.org/licenses). Maybe robocop2018 means "open source" in the sense of "there is possibly minified non-human readable source code that you can look at under a very restrictive non-OSI license"?


PDF.js Express is not open source.


It is available under dual AGPL/commercial license so indeed it's open source by any definition. We'll clarify this on the site. Thanks for feedback


https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui/search?q=agpl&unscop... ?


Thank you for your feedback and question. My apologies if it’s unclear. The source code for the UI is available on GitHub [1], but is minified in the download package for efficiency. Note that even though the code is "open source" in that repo, we still have a custom license [2]. [1] https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui [2] https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui/blob/6.2/LICENSE


The license reads "WebViewer React UI project/codebase or any derived works is only permitted in solutions with an active commercial PDFTron WebViewer license. For exact licensing terms please refer to your commercial WebViewer license. For use in other scenario, please contact sales@pdftron.com".

That is a proprietary source-available license, very much not open source at all.


Please don't use the term open source, not even in quotes, if your code is not available under a license that meets the Open Source Definition or the Free Software Definition.


So which is it? robocop2018 is claiming it's AGPL/commercial dual-licensed, but you say it just has the custom license and that's the only license in the repo?


We are in the process of updating the site. The product will be licensed under dual GPL/commercial terms (re: what it means see bit.ly/2JD0Yj0)


What license is this under? Where can I get the source code?

The website says it is open source in one place, and then in other places it says it is a "commercial PDF web viewer that wraps around the PDF.js open-source rendering engine."

I didn't see any link to the source code or license anywhere on the site?


See other messages. The code is available and will be licensed under dual commercial/AGPL terms (similar to bit.ly/2JD0Yj0)


Are you affiliated with PDFTron, the company that created this? Your posting history suggests you are. Please disclose if so.


Yes, I am employed by PDFTron. I've been leading this project since early 2019.


I was asking "robocop2018". Are you him?


I am not "him" :) though I work at PDFTron

As Nick says the project is open source (https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui).

Express is available under under dual AGPL/commercial license ( similar to iText and lot's of other popular OSS )


There is no mention of AGPL anywhere in that repository. There is just a LICENSE file with a completely different proprietary license: it is not open source at present. If you intend to make it open source, you need to change the license to an open source one.


Where is the AGPL license?


It's https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0 Or summary of what it means bit.ly/2JD0Yj0

If you are talking about info on the site & git, we are working on it. There will be many changes over next few weeks. Stay tuned :)


Yes, I'm familiar with the license.

The question was about your claim that it was already licensed under it. Apparently it's not, but you're "working on it". Umm, okay.


Does not support XFA forms


Yes, that's correct. It's not supported by PDF.js [1]. But the good news is that it looks like Adobe is finally moving away from their proprietary XFA format, with the introduction of their forms extension.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/2373


Am I missing something? Why should I pay 5000 for a pdf viewer, with features dozens of other pdf viewers have?


The talk is not about pdf viewers but about framework/APIs that developers can use to build all those 'others' solutions. pdfjs.express makes this a piece of cake, you get the source, and companies can outdo competition will less developer $$$ sunk into reinventing the wheel


Do you just use the open source PDF.js engine or do you contribute back to the project with fixes and features?


It's an extension of pdf.js, not a fork.


The parent didn't ask if it was a fork or not.


The point being that this is an extension, and contributing back to that dependency is orthogonal.


If they contribute back was the question.


Our intention with PDF.js Express is to provide a solution that meets a market need for a PDF.js viewer with out-of-the-box features. Building this viewer that wraps around the PDF.js engine was no small task and we do hope that it will provide some value to developers. With that said, our goal is to grow usage of PDF.js Express and the PDF.js project. Ultimately the more developers we can bring to the platform the better it is for us and for the open-source community. We’ve started by creating articles that should help others get started with vanilla pdf.js: How to Build a PDF.js Viewer in React + Typescript [1] and How to Add Zoom Controls to a PDF.js Viewer [2]. We plan on creating more of these guides and now that we've launched this product, we will be looking to help move the pdf.js project forward.

[1] https://pdfjs.express/blog/building-pdfjs-viewer [2] https://pdfjs.express/blog/build-pdfjs-viewer-ui


So you plan to post some advertising tutorials and grow the developer community, aka you're doing nothing, but you're not contributing to the project that is in the core of your product? No wonder open source projects die, no one gives back.

I'm not here to argue, just making an observation.


> modern react UI.

What is an ancient react UI?


Whatever was popular >1 month(s) ago.




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