Cross-plaftorm build

[Sroka]

Hey, awesome project. Recently, I was thinking about building a PDF reader in Rust and this is just what I need :)

What platform are you able to build it for? I would like to cover as many as possible. I found a repo showing how to build PDFium for all platforms but Windows and Linux:
https://github.com/paulo-coutinho/pdfium-lib

[asafigan]

I believe that it should be able to support all platforms. I haven't tested anything other than MacOS. The only problems I can think of would be Windows file paths. I looked into the encoding requirements for PDFium on Windows and it was not straight forward. You could always load the file into memory and than pass it to PDFium that way. I do plan on testing more platforms before publishing to crates.io.

Personally I tried building PDFium from source multiple times and I gave up because it was too frustrating. I would suggest downloading a prebuilt binary. I just updated the README with a link to https://github.com/bblanchon/pdfium-binaries which is what I used. You will only need the basic library. No need for V8 and everything else. You will have to look up how to install the binary libraries and C headers correctly for your platform. I have only ever done this on MacOS.

Hopes this helps.

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Just curious. Why are you building a PDF render in Rust?

[Sroka]

Just curious. Why are you building a PDF render in Rust?

Reader not render :) I wanted to try to build an open source version of something like MarginNote3 or LiquidText. Sure, I could use PDS.js and build it in Typescript with React in tenth of the time but where is fun in that? :)

[asafigan]

May I suggest you look at poppler-rs. It is a rust wrapper around poppler. I believe it is fully featured but it hasn't been updated in 2 years. Poppler has a different license so look into it before building anything.

Also if you want to get even more low level, there are some people working on a pure Rust renderer called pdf_render. They have a web demo if you want to check it out.