As of 2016-05-04, GN is used to generate build files replacing GYP. GYP support will remain until it is disabled in Chromium and then will be removed from PDFium.
As of 2016-04-28, the Visual Studio toolchain from depot_tools is used as the default Windows toolchain for Googlers. Please set DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0 if you need to use the system toolchain. See Windows development subsection for details.
Get the chromium depot tools via the instructions at http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/install-depot-tools (this provides the gclient utility needed below).
Also install Python, Subversion, and Git and make sure they're in your path.
PDFium uses a similar Windows toolchain as Chromium:
Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 or later is highly recommended.
Run set DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0, or set that variable in your global
environment.
Compilation is done through ninja, not Visual Studio.
Run: download_from_google_storage --config and follow the
authentication instructions. Note that you must authenticate with your
@google.com credentials. Enter "0" if asked for a project-id.
Once you've done this, the toolchain will be installed automatically for you in the step below.
The toolchain will be in depot_tools\win_toolchain\vs_files\<hash>, and windbg
can be found in depot_tools\win_toolchain\vs_files\<hash>\win_sdk\Debuggers.
If you want the IDE for debugging and editing, you will need to install it separately, but this is optional and not needed for building PDFium.
The name of the top-level directory does not matter. In our examples, we use
"repo". This directory must not have been used before by gclient config as
each directory can only house a single gclient configuration.
mkdir repo
cd repo
gclient config --unmanaged https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium.git
gclient sync
cd pdfium
We use GN to generate the build files and Ninja (also included with the depot_tools checkout) to execute the build files.
gn gen <directory>
If you want to set to out/Debug or out/Release you'll need to
export GYP_PDFIUM_NO_ACTION=1 to stop gclient sync from executing GYP
and overwriting your build files.
### Selecting build configuration
PDFium may be built either with or without JavaScript support, and with or without XFA forms support. Both of these features are enabled by default. Also note that the XFA feature requires JavaScript.
Configuration is done by executing gn args <directory> to configure the build.
This will launch an editor in which you can set the following arguments.
use_goma = true # Googlers only.
is_debug = true # Enable debugging features.
pdf_use_skia = false # Set true to enable experimental skia backend.
pdf_enable_xfa = true # Set false to remove XFA support (implies JS support).
pdf_enable_v8 = true # Set false to remove Javascript support.
pdf_is_standalone = true # Set for a non-embedded build.
is_component_build = false # Disable component build (must be false)
clang_use_chrome_plugins = false # Currently must be false.
use_sysroot = false # Currently must be false on Linux.
Note, you must set pdf_is_standalone = true if you want the sample
applications like pdfium_test to build.
When complete the arguments will be stored in <directory>/args.gn.
If you used Ninja, you can build the sample program by:
ninja -C <directory>/pdfium_test You can build the entire product (which
includes a few unit tests) by: ninja -C <directory>.
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: <directory>/pdfium_test --ppm path/to/myfile.pdf. Note
that this will write output images to path/to/myfile.pdf.<n>.ppm.
There are currently several test suites that can be run:
- pdfium_unittests
- pdfium_embeddertests
- testing/tools/run_corpus_tests.py
- testing/tools/run_javascript_tests.py
- testing/tools/run_pixel_tests.py
It is possible the tests in the testing directory can fail due to font
differences on the various platforms. These tests are reliable on the bots. If
you see failures, it can be a good idea to run the tests on the tip-of-tree
checkout to see if the same failures appear.
The current health of the source tree can be found at http://build.chromium.org/p/client.pdfium/console
There are several mailing lists that are setup:
Note, the Reviews and Bugs lists are typically read-only.
We use 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.
For contributing code, we will follow Chromium's process as much as possible. The main exceptions is:
- Code has to conform to the existing style and not Chromium/Google style.