Building PDFium

Prerequisites

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.

Get the code

mkdir pdfium
cd pdfium
gclient config --name . --unmanaged https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium.git
gclient sync

Generate the build files

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.

Building the code

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

Running the sample program

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

Waterfall

The current health of the source tree can be found at http://build.chromium.org/p/client.pdfium/console

Bugs

We will be using this bug tracker, but for security bugs, please use [Chromium's security bug template] (https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/entry?template=Security%20Bug) and add the “Cr-Internals-Plugins-PDF” label.

Contributing code

For contributing code, we will follow Chromium's process as much as possible. The main exceptions are:

  1. Code has to conform to the existing style and not Chromium/Google style.
  2. There is no commit queue, approved committers can land their changes via git cl land
  3. Changes must be merged to the XFA branch as well (see below).

Branches

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

Merging to XFA requires:

git checkout origin/xfa
git checkout -b merge_branch
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/xfa
git cherry-pick -x <commit hash>
git commit --amend # add Merge to XFA
git cl upload

Then wait for approval, and git cl land