Jul 5, 2011 13:39 GMT  ·  By

A little over a couple of weeks ago, some Mozilla developers revealed that they were working on a web-based PDF reader that used standard web technology - JavaScript, to decode and render PDF files. The team has already made big progress and its initial goal of pixel-perfect rendering of a specific file has been achieved.

This and the number of other improvements and new features added meant that pdf.js, the understated name of the project, is now complete enough to warrant a version number increment.

"Last Friday, pdf.js reached the state we wanted to it to be in before announcing it loudly: it renders the Tracemonkey paper perfectly. So, we’re announcing it! Try out version 0.2," the Mozilla developers announced.

Initially, the team wanted to have pdf.js render a PDF file on Tracemonkey techniques perfectly, before announcing the project to the world.

That didn't happen and word on the project got out. Regardless, pdf.js has now reached its initial goal, albeit in a limited way. It is pixel-perfect, but only when using Firefox 7 nightly builds on Windows 7.

Anything else still has some rendering issues, despite the fact that it's using standard JavaScript technology, which should work the same on every browser.

Still, this is to be expected so early in the project. Even so, version 0.2 brings a more complete user interface, there are now thumbnails of the pages for example.

It also introduces a big breakthrough for the team, the ability to dynamically load TrueType fonts, to be used in the documents.

"For our next release, we have two big goals: first is to continue adding features needed to render PDFs (of course!). Our next target is a bit more ambitious: pixel-perfect rendering of the PDF 1.7 specification itself," the team wrote.

While still in the early days, the project holds a lot of promise. There are a lot of PDF files online, files that were not intended to be viewed on the web.

Browsers currently need external plugins to render PDF files, which leads to a lot of performance and security issues. A reader built with JavaScript and HTML5 would eliminate all of these problems and present a standards-based solution.

PDF.js is available for download here on Softpedia.

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Differences between PDF.js 0.1 and 0.2
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