Open a PDF in React on the web with react-pdf

In previous articles, you learned about options for opening a PDF in your web app without JavaScript and how to render PDF files in the browser with PDF.js.

Today, you’ll take a step further and explore how to open a PDF in a React(opens in a new tab) application on the web using Vite(opens in a new tab). Vite is a fast and lightweight development server and build tool that’s perfect for modern web applications. React is a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces across multiple platforms, including web, iOS, and Android.

In this article, you’ll use react-pdf(opens in a new tab) to render a PDF inside a React app created with Vite. If you’re looking for a React Native guide, check out our blog post on how to open a PDF in React Native.

Getting started

For this article, you’ll be using a library by Wojciech Maj called react-pdf(opens in a new tab). If you use your favorite online search engine, you’ll likely find another library(opens in a new tab) with the same name, created by Diego Muracciole. However, at the time of writing, the latter is only used to create PDFs.

react-pdf provides a React-based component API for opening PDF files and rendering them using PDF.js.

To get started, create a new React app using Vite. Run the following commands in your terminal:

npm create vite@latest pdf-app -- --template react
cd pdf-app
npm install
npm run dev

After running these commands, Vite will start a development server, and your browser will open with a running React app.

Rendering a PDF in React

To start rendering your first PDF, place the file you want to render inside the ./public directory of the pdf-app folder. This ensures you can access the file from the web.

Next, add react-pdf to your project:

npm install react-pdf

react-pdf comes with two components that are of interest when rendering a PDF: Document and Page. Document is used to open a PDF and is a mandatory part. Within the document, you can mount pages, which are used to render the PDF page. To integrate this into your example project, open ./src/App.js and replace its contents with the following:

import { useState } from 'react';
import { Document, Page } from 'react-pdf';

const App = () => {
  const [numPages, setNumPages] = useState(null);
  const [pageNumber, setPageNumber] = useState(1);

  const onDocumentLoadSuccess = ({ numPages }) => {
    setNumPages(numPages);
  };

  const goToPrevPage = () => setPageNumber((prevPage) => prevPage - 1);
  const goToNextPage = () => setPageNumber((prevPage) => prevPage + 1);

  return (
    <div>
      <nav>
        <button onClick={goToPrevPage}>Prev</button>
        <button onClick={goToNextPage}>Next</button>
      </nav>

      <div style={{ width: 600 }}>
        <Document
          file="/example.pdf"
          onLoadSuccess={onDocumentLoadSuccess}
        >
          <Page pageNumber={pageNumber} width={600} />
        </Document>
      </div>

      <p>
        Page {pageNumber} of {numPages}
      </p>
    </div>
  );
};

export default App;

This is already enough to render a PDF in React.

Place your PDF file in the ./public directory and name it example.pdf. If you don’t have a PDF file handy, you can use this example PDF.

Since react-pdf doesn’t come with a user interface, you’ve built your own. In the example above, you render two buttons to navigate the page within the <nav> elements and show the total progress on the bottom. The result looks something like what’s shown below.

Enabling advanced PDF features in react-pdf

By default, react-pdf enables important features of PDF.js — including the text layer, which allows you to copy and paste text from a PDF. However, one feature that’s disabled is the dedicated annotation layer. In a PDF, annotations provide additional information and enable the use of hyperlinks. In the example PDF, there’s a hyperlink on the first page that you want to enable as well. To do this, import an additional file for the CSS that’s needed:

import 'react-pdf/dist/Page/AnnotationLayer.css';

Another improvement you can make is to use web workers(opens in a new tab) so that your PDFs can be rendered in another thread. This keeps the main window responsive at all times. Luckily, react-pdf comes with prebuilt support for adding this option to webpack(opens in a new tab), and Create React App uses webpack under the hood.

To enable web workers, replace your input line with the following:

import React, { Component } from "react";
 import { Document, Page } from "react-pdf";
 import { Document, Page } from "react-pdf/dist/entry.webpack";
import "react-pdf/dist/Page/AnnotationLayer.css";

You can see the worker in action by inspecting the page with your favorite developer tools.

Conclusion

With just a few lines of code, you were able to utilize the full power of PDF.js in a React application. This is a great and low-cost way to get started with simple use cases. For more complex use cases, a commercial React PDF library can provide additional benefits:

1. An out-of-the-box PDF viewer user interface (UI) to help speed up development time. Quickly deploy a polished UI in your application and use well-documented APIs to customize the design and layout.
2. Embed prebuilt PDF tools to easily add functionality like annotating documents, editing PDFs, adding digital signatures to a PDF form, and much more.
3. View multiple file types — from image files (JPG, PNG, TIFF) to MS Office documents.
4. Get a quick response from a dedicated support team if you encounter a challenge or issue when integrating the viewer.

At Nutrient, we offer a commercial, feature-rich, and completely customizable JavaScript PDF library that’s easy to integrate and comes with well-documented APIs to handle advanced use cases. Try it for free, and visit our demo to see it in action, or check out our example application(opens in a new tab) to learn more.

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