pdf.js: pdf.js doesn't work with requirejs

The following HTML demonstrates the issue:

<head>
    <title>Flexpaper React/Require Sandbox</title>
    <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/require.js/2.2.0/require.js"></script>
    <script>
        require(['pdf'], function(pdf) {
            console.log('PDFJS Module: ' + pdf);
            console.log('PDFJS Global: ' + window.PDFJS);
        });
    </script>
</head>
</html>

pdf.js, detects the existence of the “require” and “define” functions and accordingly does NOT set the global PDFJS instance. However, it also does not return a reference to that instance through the module loader.

Because both “pdf” and “window.PDFJS” are undefined in the example above, the library cannot be used in applications that use require. This is the case regardless of whether or not require is used to load pdf.js.

Note that this works correctly with version 1.0.1040 but fails with 1.4.20 and 1.5.188. I did not test with versions other than those 3. The behavior was consistent in all three versions between Chrome and Safari.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 8 years ago
Reactions: 1
Comments: 18 (7 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

As I was struggling a bit with correct referencing in RequireJS too, I will leave my solution, which is part of the RequireJS config:

paths: {
    'pdfjs-dist/build/pdf': 'myfolder/pdf.min',
    'pdfjs-dist/build/pdf.worker': 'myfolder/pdf.worker.min'
}

When you do it like that, you do not even have to assign the path to the worker to PDFJS.workerSrc, as suggested in the examples, because the worker will be found automatically.

+15

dwaxweiler on Nov 30, 2017

Thank you @dmaxweiler! I struggled with the same issue – I was having trouble getting pdf.js to load correctly when using RequireJS also. Your solution worked for me! Awesome. Thanks for your help.

allandaly on Jan 8, 2018

There are two issues with the code:

module is not referred by its name, use ‘pdfjs-dist/build/pdf’ (and if you are moving pdfjs-dist in different place use require.config to change the location)
you are using document.write, which erases document

Try something like:

        require.config({paths: {'pdfjs-dist': './node_modules/pdfjs-dist'}});
        require(['pdfjs-dist/build/pdf'], function(pdf) {
            console.log('PDFJS Module: ' + pdf + '<br>');
            console.log('PDFJS Global: ' + window.PDFJS);
        });

Closing as answered.

yurydelendik on May 3, 2016