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It uses pdf js under the hood. the ui is very nice and responsive in terms of it loads fast when navigating pages. might use in an upcoming project.

https://github.com/react-pdf-viewer/react-pdf-viewer/blob/ma...

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What is the benefit of importing a dependency only as devDependency and including it like this in the build? Why not just declare a normal dependency?

presumably, declaring it this way means you don't ever distribute pdfjs but expect it to be available in the runtime.

Not sure if this was the goal.

It seems to me that they are using Rollup to bundle the PDF.js source code into their own.

I’d guess it makes sense for PDF.js since you likely won’t need it outside of this library in your own project and it comes with multiple builds, of which they might choose one specific.

Then install speeds are faster and node_modules are smaller.

Thanks for the explanation.

DevDependencies are not installed when you use —production flag at npm install (saving space and time here when you include this package) they are only used for releasing the package versions in this case I assume.

Yes, I understand the general use of dev dependencies. However, in this case, 'pdfjs-dist' must be in the build output anyway. So, what is the benefit of including it indirectly?

Seems like they don't mention that fact anywhere in the readme or homepage.

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