bobsingor

Yeah, I was surprised too. Rendering actually feels even faster on my iOS device at high zoom than on desktop Chrome. It’s pretty fascinating.

I’m currently working on annotations, highlights, comments, and more. Made good progress and should have something to release soon!

Quick update: I just added a new option where you can set a custom wasmUrl when initializing the snippet. This way you can host your own .wasm build if you want to be 100% sure it hasn’t been modified.

Here’s the commit: https://github.com/embedpdf/embed-pdf-viewer/commit/ff928377...

Thanks again for raising the point — really good feedback!

Good question. You can fully reproduce the build. We have a Dockerfile here that handles the process: https://github.com/embedpdf/embed-pdf-viewer/blob/main/packa...

Also, if you look in the package.json, there is a wasm script set up. Running pnpm run wasm will build the .wasm file inside Docker, so you get a clean, repeatable build.

Thanks so much, that’s a huge compliment, really appreciate it.

Actually, most of what you’re describing is already there. We built a tiling plugin (https://github.com/embedpdf/embed-pdf-viewer/tree/main/packa...) that works kind of like Google Maps — instead of rendering the full document, it splits it into tiles and only renders what’s visible in the viewport. That’s how we keep it fast even for really large documents.

Right now we support pinch-zoom on mobile, but mouse pan/zoom isn’t wired up yet. Would love to see you collaborate on the project if you’re interested. This kind of feedback is a big encouragement!

Thanks! I’ll be adding clearer documentation soon on how to integrate it with React and other major frameworks.

The viewer is designed to be framework-agnostic, and I’m working on lightweight integration layers for React, Vue, Svelte, etc. Stay tuned!

Thanks! Really appreciate that — curious to hear how it works out for you.

As for size (gzipped): the main JS file is about 77kB, the web worker is around 43kB, and the largest part is pdfium.wasm at roughly 2.7MB. The wasm handles all the heavy lifting, and it loads separately, so the core viewer stays pretty lightweight.

Thanks! Yeah, I really get that, pdf.js gave me a ton of headaches too. Honestly, that’s part of why I started building this. I just needed something that didn’t fight me every step of the way.

Not planning to build a PDF generator just yet, but you're not the first to mention it. If more folks are looking for that kind of thing, I’d definitely consider it. Appreciate you bringing it up!

Thanks!

Wow, that really means a lot coming from you! I’ve come across SimplePDF quite a few times while researching! Super impressed by what you’ve built. Thanks for the kind words, fellow PDF’er

I just open-sourced EmbedPDF, a modern JavaScript PDF viewer that uses PDFium compiled to WebAssembly — not PDF.js.

If you've ever tried to deeply customize PDF.js or needed high-fidelity rendering, you’ve probably hit its limits. And when looking for alternatives, most roads lead to Apryse (formerly PDFTron) or Nutrient (formerly PSPDFKit) — both powerful, but closed-source and expensive.

There hasn’t really been a good middle ground — until now.

GitHub: https://github.com/embedpdf/embed-pdf-viewer

Demo & Docs: https://www.embedpdf.com

Wow this worked! Your amazing! Thank you so much

Yes, i'm also done with Heroku. What alternative do you recommend?