Published code engine for rendering PDF in Chrome browser

Google has released the source code for PDFium , an engine that renders PDF in Chrome, under the free BSD license. It provides very accurate and fast rendering of documents, without conceding Acrobat Reader.

The PDFium engine was developed with the participation of the commercial company Foxit Software , which produces many proprietary programs for working with PDF, including document editors, fast archive indexers, SDKs for implementation in third-party products. The developers claim that their software is about three times as powerful as any other software for working with PDF, including Adobe proprietary software.

Apparently, Google licensed the rendering engine from Foxit Software and obtained permission to put the source code in public use.

Without a doubt, PDFium will find wide application in other free projects. For example, you can now safely add clean and high-quality C ++ code for rendering PDF to the Chromium browser, as well as to Firefox, Opera, and so on.
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Mozilla developers have long been developing their pdf.js engine in JavaScript; now they can release their power for other projects. And Firefox users will get normal PDF rendering, since PDFium is faster and better than pdf.js and any other counterparts.

However, for Mozilla is not so simple. This plugin uses the V8 engine for rendering JavaScript, so you have to include it in Firefox, with all the ensuing consequences due to the presence of two rendering engines. But in Chromium can be embedded without problems.