Browse PDFs in a Qt Widgets application

Tobias Koenig

2 May 2018

QPdfView

QPdfView is a widget that renders a PDF document that has been loaded through QPdfDocument. It offers a single page and a continuous multi page mode and the user can choose between fit-to-width, fit-in-view or a custom zoom level.

To avoid the UI getting blocked while the PDF document is rendered, the rendering of the single pages is off-loaded to a worker thread.

Getting the code

To test the new features, just clone the QtPdf repository, install it and compile the examples like this:

git clone git://code.qt.io/qt-labs/qtpdf
cd qtpdf
git submodule update --init --recursive
qmake
make
cd examples/pdf/pdfviewer
qmake
make
./pdfviewer

Usage

Using QPdfView is quite simple - loading a PDF document and showing it on screen can be done in a couple of lines now:

#include <QPdfDocument>
#include <QPdfView>

QPdfDocument *document = new QPdfDocument;
document->load("document.pdf");

QPdfView *view = new QPdfView;
view->setDocument(document);
view->show();

If you want to see a more extensive example, have a look at the examples/pdf/pdfviewer directory in the QtPdf module.

Next steps

At the moment the PDFium version which is shipped with QtPdf is rather outdated, and therefore does not include the latest security fixes from upstream. The blocking factor from upgrading it is PDFium's build system, which has changed from gyp to gn; the build system integration inside QtPdf hasn't followed up yet.

Thankfully, Michal Klocek from The Qt Company provided the first patches that allow us to implement a proper integration between qmake and gn, so that compiling the QtPdf module with an up-to-date PDFium version should be much easier in the future.

On the UI side there are many things to do as well, here just a short selection from the top of my head:

extend navigation possibilities (e.g. follow links, navigate to sections)
add custom QtQuick item to render PDF pages (patches in progress already)
extend and improve documentation.

Nonetheless, I hope this module will be useful to the many users who are looking for an easy solution to render PDF documents in their Qt applications!

View our 'Widgets and more' video series

Yes, widgets are still alive and kicking. In the many years we have worked with them, we have gathered quite a number of tips and tricks that we’d love to share with you.

Tags:

qml qt

About KDAB

The KDAB Group is a globally recognized provider for software consulting, development and training, specializing in embedded devices and complex cross-platform desktop applications. In addition to being leading experts in Qt, C++ and 3D technologies for over two decades, KDAB provides deep expertise across the stack, including Linux, Rust and modern UI frameworks. With 100+ employees from 20 countries and offices in Sweden, Germany, USA, France and UK, we serve clients around the world.

21 Comments

Great news! Thanks Tobias (and everyone who worked on this).

Just tip for someone who met issue (error during building) like below: ../3rdparty/pdfium/third_party/freetype/src/base/ftbase.c:19:10: fatal error: ft2build.h: No such file or directory #include

This happens only when you use python3. If your main python is python2 you should be able to build QtPdf. For all who use python3 workaround is making link to python2 (just temporary relink /usr/bin/python to python2). Sad is that, I reported this issue over one year ago (January 2017) and nobody fixed this yet :(. Check: http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/01/30/new-qtpdf-qtlabs-module/

Hej Peter,

thank you very much for the hint, I haven't seen your comment on Shawns blog post, so I missed the fact that the current build system does not work with Python 3. Anyway, since the next step will be to update the build system to use gn (to be compatible with upstream PDFium), this Python script will be replaced and therefore the problem hopefully be solved soon.

A little bit late, but for those who are trying to build using python3, Modify qtpdf/src/3rdparty/gyp2pri.py:121 to for key, value in variables.items(): then you can build pdf and pdfwidget usin python3 Now I run make install, but qmake does not recognize module pdf. ¿What am I doing wrong?

Isn't better just to use this library "poppler" (exists poppler-qt5 which is Qt5 bindings) instead of build qtpdf?

Hej Peter,

the Poppler library is distributed under the GPL license, so it cannot (easily) be used in proprietary projects. Furthermore the PDFium library is actively maintained by Google (since it is used by Chromium to render PDFs) and for graphic intensive documents it renders the pages much faster than Poppler.

Whats wrong about popler or whats the advantage here?

Please see my response to Peter's question

Is there any possibility of something like a QPDFGraphicsItem that could be used in a QGraphicsView rather than requiring a dedicated view widget for just this type of object? Or does the underlying PDF library make it impractical to provide that kind of deeper Qt integration beyond a widget to view what the library spits out?

Hej Will, the QPdfDocument class allows you to render a specific page (or part of a page) into a QImage, so it shouldn't be too difficult to reimplement a QGraphicsItem subclass which utilizes this function to display parts of a PDF document. However, at the moment the QtPdf module doesn't provide a convenience class for it, but upstream contributions are always welcome :)

On openSuse I get the following errors:

cd lib/ && ( test -e Makefile || /usr/bin/qmake-qt5 -o Makefile /home/PACKAGES/qt/5.9.2/src/qtpdf/src/lib/lib.pro ) && make -f Makefile
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/PACKAGES/qt/5.9.2/src/qtpdf/src/3rdparty/gyp2pri.py", line 162, in
    gyp = Gyp(config.input, variables)
  File "/home/PACKAGES/qt/5.9.2/src/qtpdf/src/3rdparty/gyp2pri.py", line 7, in __init__
    with open(fileName, "r") as f:
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/PACKAGES/qt/5.9.2/src/qtpdf/src/3rdparty/pdfium/pdfium.gyp'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/PACKAGES/qt/5.9.2/src/qtpdf/src/3rdparty/gyp2pri.py", line 162, in
    gyp = Gyp(config.input, variables)
  File "/home/PACKAGES/qt/5.9.2/src/qtpdf/src/3rdparty/gyp2pri.py", line 7, in __init__
    with open(fileName, "r") as f:
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/PACKAGES/qt/5.9.2/src/qtpdf/src/3rdparty/pdfium/third_party/third_party.gyp'
Cannot read /home/PACKAGES/qt/5.9.2/src/qtpdf/src/lib/pdfium.pri: No such file or directory
Cannot read /home/PACKAGES/qt/5.9.2/src/qtpdf/src/lib/freetype.pri: No such file or directory
and later also
jsbridge.cpp:37:50: fatal error: fpdfsdk/javascript/JS_Runtime_Stub.cpp: No such file or directory

Hej Martin, have you initialized the submodules correctly (e.g. called 'git submodule update --init --recursive')? Looks like your 'qtpdf/src/3rdparty/pdfium/' directory is empty, which indicates that the pdfium submodule has not been cloned.

Stupid me ... Sorry for the noise. I overlooked this step.

Sorry for the noise, I have overlooked this step. Works now. Thanks.

Thanks Tobias, It's been a long time since my original request of having a PDF viewer (QTBUG-28886) and I am glad to see it starting to happen. As soon as the new build system is in place, I plan on dedicating time on adding form editing to your QtPDF module wrapper to take advantage of these features in PDFium.

Can you also use QPdfDocument to create a PDF by code and save it? QPdfWriter unfortunately has one severe restriction - no bookmarks and links.

Hej Robert, QPdfDocument only provides API do render PDF documents, but not to assemble them. Links are 'kind of' supported by QPdfWriter, the QPdfEngine class has a member drawHyperlink(QRect, QUrl), so when you use a QPainter that draws on a QPrinter in PDF output mode and include the private header qpdf_p.h, you could do dynamic_cast<QPdfEngine*>(painter.paintEngine())->drawHyperlink(...). So it is private API which can be accessed on your own risk. ;)

That's too bad. Thanks for the hint, though!

Hi, QPdfView is great and easy to implement. I quick got an lightweight pdf viewer. I also implemented a search toolbox to search the pdf for an specific text string. But now I want to highlight the text where I found the string. Is there a method to highlight some text?

Hej,

unfortunately there is no public API available yet to highlight the text.

Is it possible to highlight text in a QPdfView?

Tobias Koenig

Senior Software Engineer

Senior software engineer at KDAB, Tobias has actively developed with Qt since 2001 and has been an active KDE contributor during this time. His contributions have been mainly to the KDE PIM project and the KDE libraries, but also to other open source projects. He holds an MSc in Computer Science.

Browse PDFs in a Qt Widgets application

QPdfView

Getting the code

Usage

Next steps

21 Comments

Related Content

Join KDAB Training Day 2025 in Munich

Sign up for the KDAB Newsletter

Browse PDFs in a Qt Widgets application

QPdfView

Getting the code

Usage

Next steps

21 Comments

Related Content

KDAB Training Day - May 8th, 2025

10 Tips to Make Your QML Code Faster and More Maintainable

KD Reports 2.3.0

Join KDAB Training Day 2025 in Munich

Sign up for the KDAB Newsletter