TL;DR: PDF viewers are essential tools for developers seeking PDF viewing functionality in their apps. This blog explores some of the best React PDF Viewers available on the market.
Overview
PDF Viewers are components that allow users to view and interact with PDF documents. They offer navigation, zooming, text selection, search, and annotation tools. Viewers usually support clickable hyperlinks and include a toolbar.
The following are the best React PDF viewers for developers:
- Syncfusion React PDF Viewer
- React PDF
- PDFKit
- pdfme
- Nutrient
Syncfusion® React PDF Viewer
The React PDF Viewer is a lightweight and modular component for viewing and printing PDF files. It provides an excellent viewing experience with core interactions such as zooming, scrolling, text searching, text selection, and text copying. The thumbnail, bookmark, hyperlink, and table of contents support provide easy navigation within and outside the PDF files.
Key features
- PDF viewing:
- Supports viewing PDF documents directly in the browser.
- Offers a rich, responsive, interactive UI with smooth scrolling and zooming.
- Supports various page display options (single page, continuous scroll).
- Annotations:
- Provides tools for adding text, highlights, shapes (rectangle, circle), freehand drawing (ink), and stamps.
- Allows annotations to be edited, deleted, and saved for later use.
- Includes built-in support for importing and exporting annotations as JSON.
- Form filling:
- Enables users to interact with PDF form fields, such as text boxes, radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdowns, and signatures.
- Supports both manual and programmatic form field input.
- Text markup:
- Supports text highlights, underlines, strikethroughs, and squiggly annotations for marking up text in PDFs.
- Search and selection:
- Provides a built-in text-search feature with options for case-sensitive and whole-word searches.
- Allows text selection and copying.
- Document management:
- Offers features like page rotation, page navigation, and thumbnail previews.
- Supports printing of PDF documents directly from the viewer.
- Customizable toolbar:
- Offers a default toolbar with essential actions like open, save, print, download, search, and annotations.
- Allows customization of the toolbar and the addition of custom buttons.
- File format support:
- Primarily supports the PDF format, including PDF/A and digitally signed PDFs.
- Can handle complex PDFs with embedded images, fonts, and annotations.
- Server-side processing:
- Requires server-side support to handle PDF rendering and processing.
- Available server-side libraries include ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET Web API.
- Cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility:
- Compatible with modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari.
- Works across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
License: To obtain a free license for the PDF Viewer, check your eligibility and follow the steps outlined in how to get a community license and install it.
React-PDF
React-PDF is a React wrapper for PDF.js that makes it easy to integrate PDF viewing into React apps. It’s designed to be simple and flexible for developers who need a quick solution for displaying PDFs.
Key features
- Page-by-page rendering: Efficiently renders PDF files by loading pages dynamically, which is ideal for large documents.
- Zooming and scaling: Supports zoom functionality, allowing users to view PDF files in different sizes.
- On-demand rendering: Pages are rendered on demand as users scroll through the document, improving performance when dealing with large PDFs.
- Interactive elements: Displays links, form fields, and images contained in PDFs.
License: React-PDF is available under the MIT License, making it free to use and modify in commercial and personal projects.
PDFKit
PDFKit is a JavaScript library designed primarily for creating PDFs programmatically. It allows developers to generate PDFs from scratch rather than just viewing them.
Key features
- PDF generation: You can create dynamic PDF documents from scratch and insert text, images, and graphics.
- Customization: Offers complete control over PDF generation, including custom page layouts, fonts, and styling.
- Cross-platform: Works in both Node.js and the browser.
- Annotations: Basic annotation support includes adding text, links, and form fields.
License: Distributed under the MIT License, making it free for commercial and noncommercial use.
pdfme
pdfme is a lightweight and simple library for creating and manipulating PDF documents. It is designed to be straightforward, making it easy for basic PDF generation and manipulation tasks.
Key features
- PDF creation: Provides a simple API to create PDFs by adding text, images, and basic shapes.
- Basic annotations: Supports simple annotations like text highlights and comments.
- Lightweight: A minimalistic library designed to be easy to use with minimal setup.
License: Available under the MIT License, it’s free for personal and commercial use.
Nutrient
Nutrient is a premium PDF SDK that provides a full suite of features for working with PDFs. Unlike the other options, Nutrient offers full PDF editing capabilities beyond simple viewing and rendering.
Key features
- Advanced editing: Provides tools for editing PDF documents, including text editing, form field creation, and adding images.
- Annotations: Extensive annotation support, including highlights, notes, and drawing tools.
- Text search and extraction: Features advanced search and text extraction capabilities.
- Customizable UI: The PDF Viewer’s interface is highly customizable to fit the look and feel of your app.
License: Nutrient is a commercial product, and you need to purchase a license to use it. However, they offer a free trial for evaluation.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading! In this blog, we’ve discussed the top React PDF Viewer libraries for handling large PDF files. Based on the complexity of the features you require, you can select the most suitable React PDF viewer library for your project.
