Introduction

Similar to shadcn/ui, this is not a component library. It is how you build your PDF viewer.

pdfviewcn takes embedpdf — a headless PDF engine built on PDFium and Web Workers — and gives it a shape you own: composable React components distributed as copy-paste code through the shadcn CLI.

embedpdf already centralizes the hard parts. Rendering, tiling, scrolling, zoom, search, selection, and annotation all live in its plugins. What it deliberately doesn't ship is the chrome: the sidebars, toolbars, loading states, and error states that turn an engine into a viewer. That's the part you always end up rewriting to match your product, so pdfviewcn hands it to you as source rather than as an API surface.

So the scope is one half of the format: this opens a PDF and gives a person something to work with — read it, search it, annotate it, comment on it, sign it. Nothing here makes one. There is no layout engine, no template, no renderer that emits a file. If you need to produce a document, reach for a generation library and use pdfviewcn to show the result.

Philosophy#

The components in this registry are built around four key principles:

• Compose, don't reimplement: pdfviewcn's chrome is assembled from ordinary shadcn/ui components — Button, ScrollArea, Alert, ToggleGroup, Tooltip. A bookmark sidebar is a ScrollArea full of ghost Buttons, not a bespoke widget that merely resembles one.
• The engine stays embedpdf's: state and behavior belong to embedpdf's plugin hooks. pdfviewcn adds a styled shape and a working bootstrap, and otherwise gets out of the way.
• Open and customizable: you get the component source in your own codebase. Restyle it, restructure it, or delete the parts you don't need.
• Static composition: embedpdf's plugin registry can't accept plugins after initialization, so <PdfViewer> owns one upfront plugin list. Which chrome you render is your choice; which plugins exist is a single, legible declaration.

Acknowledgments#

This project stands on the shoulders of embedpdf and shadcn/ui, along with PDFium and many other open source projects. Thank you to all the maintainers and contributors who make this possible.

FAQ#

Next steps#

Head to Installation to add the engine bootstrap and your first <PdfViewer>.