Get the chromium depot tools via the instructions at http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/install-depot-tools (this provides the gclient utilty needed below).
Also install Python, Subversion, and Git and make sure they're in your path.
Optionally, you may want to install the Ninja build system (recommended) rather than using your platform-specific build system.
mkdir pdfium cd pdfium gclient config --name . --unmanaged https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium.git gclient sync
Now we use the GYP library to generate the build files.
At this point, you have two options. The first option is to use the [Ninja] (http://martine.github.io/ninja/) build system. This is the default as of mid-September, 2015. Previously, the second option was the default. Most PDFium developers use Ninja, as does our [continuous build system] (http://build.chromium.org/p/client.pdfium/).
On Windows: build\gyp_pdfium
For all other platforms: build/gyp_pdfium
The second option is to generate platform-specific build files, i.e. Makefiles on Linux, sln files on Windows, and xcodeproj files on Mac. To do so, set the GYP_GENERATORS environment variable appropriately (e.g. “make”, “msvs”, or “xcode”) before running the above command.
If you used Ninja, you can build the sample program by: ninja -C out/Debug pdfium_test
You can build the entire product (which includes a few unit tests) by: ninja -C out/Debug
If you're not using Ninja, then building is platform-specific.
On Linux: make pdfium_test
On Mac, open build/all.xcodeproj
On Windows, open build\all.sln
The pdfium_test program supports reading, parsing, and rasterizing the pages of a .pdf file to .ppm or .png output image files (windows supports two other formats). For example: out/Debug/pdfium_test --ppm path/to/myfile.pdf
The current health of the source tree can be found at http://build.chromium.org/p/client.pdfium/console
There is a branch for a forthcoming feature called XFA that you can get by following the steps above, then: git checkout origin/xfa build/gyp_pdfium ninja -C out/Debug