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Building PDFium

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Pieter van Ginkel edited this page Jan 3, 2016 · 5 revisions

To build PDFium for Windows, you need Visual Studio.

The PDFium source code does not have project files for Visual Studio. The full instructions to get to a project you can open in Visual Studio, you need to follow the steps at https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/wiki/Build.

One addition to the instructions on the website is that the build\gyp_pdfium command is a Python script. To execute this, execute python build\gyp_pdfium. Also, one of the projects require the Python executable to be in the PATH. depot_tools has a Python which can be used for this. The build scripts have changed to use Ninja by default. To change this, execute set GYP_GENERATORS=msvs before you run gyp_pdfium. To create the 64-bit versions of the project, call python build/gyp_pdfium -D target_arch=x64.

After this, you can open the all.sln solution from the build directory. The project is configured to create static libraries. However, we need a dynamic library for PdfiumViewer. To have it generate a dynamic library, the following changes must be made to the configuration of the pdfium project:

  • Before opening the project properties, first set the Configuration to Release;

  • In the General tab, Configuration Type must be set to Dynamic Library (.dll);

  • In the C/C++ | General tab, the Additional Include Directories must get the extra directory v8. The full value should become third_party\freetype\include;v8;v8\include;%(AdditionalIncludeDirectories);

  • In the C/C++ | Preprocessor tab, the Preprocessor Definition FPDFSDK_EXPORTS must be added to have the DLL export the correct symbols;

  • In the Linker | Input tab, the Additional Dependencies must be set to. This dialog appears after you've saved and re-opened the project configuration:

kernel32.lib
user32.lib
advapi32.lib
gdi32.lib
winmm.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\bigint.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fdrm.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\formfiller.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fpdfapi.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fpdfdoc.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fpdftext.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fx_agg.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fx_freetype.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fx_lcms2.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fx_libopenjpeg.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fx_zlib.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fxcodec.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fxcrt.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fxedit.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\fxge.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\icui18n.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\icuuc.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\javascript.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\libjpeg.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\pdfwindow.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\test_support.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\v8_base_0.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\v8_base_1.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\v8_base_2.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\v8_base_3.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\v8_libbase.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\v8_libplatform.lib
$(OutDir)\lib\v8_nosnapshot.lib
  • A few methods need to be added to allow Pdfium to correctly initialize Pdfium. This file can be found in the Contrib directory and must be copied to the pdfium\fpdfsdk\src directory. After the file has been copied, it must be added to the project by right clicking on the src directory in the pdfium project and then choosing Add | Existing item. Select the copied source file and add it to the project.

You may have to run the build a few times because the dependencies don't appear to be resolved correctly. For me, the second time the build completes successfully.

After you've made these changes and compiled the solution, you will get a valid DLL which can be copied into the "Libraries/Pdfium" directory of the project.

To build the 64-bit version of the Pdfium library, re-run gyp_pdfium with the target architecture set as described above. The steps to update the project configuration explained above need to be performed again because they are dependent on the platform.

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