My PDF viewer has been downloaded almost two million times in 2022! When I started the project in April 2018, I suspected there was a market niche to fill, but I never expected it to be so big. 1,946,858 downloads between 01.01.2022 and 31.12.2022 are 1,946,858 signs of trust. Here's a screenshot from npmtrends.com:
Image published by
John Potter
on npmtrends.com
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The nice thing is that this growth is 100% organic. I suppose I could've pushed it by publishing articles on Medium or advertising it, but I didn't have to do any of this.
PDF Editor
To be honest, the number of downloads has plateaued a bit, and I'm curious if it will rise again. At the time of writing, there are two similar - albeit less ambitious - projects: ng2-pdf-viewer and ng2-pdfjs-viewer. Please have a look at them; they do their job well. Like my PDF viewer, they're based on Mozilla's pdf.js project, which is the PDF renderer of Firefox. I don't claim to be an expert on PDF files, so I've wrapped pdf.js as an easy-to-use Angular component.
Currently, my PDF viewer is using the most recent version of pdf.js. So it's the only Angular PDF viewer supporting the new editor feature. It's fully functional since version 2.16.0-alpha.1. Don't be confused by the "alpha" bit: I intend to publish the final release 2.16 in January 2023.
Showcase
There's a showcase of the PDF viewer, which also serves as the manual. The address is easy as can be: https://pdfviewer.net.
Please lend me a helping hand!
The PDF viewer is a leisure-time project, so I'd like to encourage you to help me. I'm always open to pull requests and ready to support you when you develop. By the way, even reviewing the documentation helps me. It's an open-source project, too, so you can easily send me a pull-request adding your insight. Another option is to report bugs, propose enhancements, or answer questions on StackOverflow.
Getting started
It only takes five minutes to get started. In a nutshell, all you have to do is to run an Angular schematic:
ng add ngx-extended-pdf-viewerThis command generates an example component if you accept all the defaults. You only have to add it to an HTML template yourself. If you need more support, have a look at the getting started page of the showcase.
Wrapping it up
You guys rock! The Angular community is amicable and helpful, so working on this project is always fun. I don't even consider it work - most of the time, it's relaxing.