Why doesn't Chromium have "Chrome PDF Viewer" plugin?

Question

The Chrome build from Google has a Chrome PDF Viewer plugin which is really nice. But, the Chromium builds don't seem to have it (nothing shows up in about:plugins).

How do I get the plugin in Chromium on Ubuntu?

Solution 1

Because the PDF plugin is not free software, i.e. it can only be included with the non-free Google Chrome browser.

See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=50852#c16 for a statement.

Solution 2

tiax is correct but it can be pulled over from a Chrome install and used from within Chromium.

You just need to pull the libpdf.so file over and enable it in about:plugins

Solution 3

You have two solutions that I can see here (applied to Ubuntu 11.10) [This was inspired by comments above and other sources I found]

• Install Chrome and then copy over *.so files which technically gets you around the legality issues

Here's how I did that...

1. Close Chromium
2. Download Chrome from Chrome distro
3. Install it on your Ubuntu release
4. cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/
5. sudo cp /opt/google/chrome/*.so .
6. Start Chromium

Note: The new plugins never showed up in my extension listing but suddenly just started working properly. By copy all *.so you are getting support for Flash, FFMPEG, and PDF support.

If you want to copy each individual item here is a listing of them for you to hand pick.

• libffmpegsumo.so - ffmpeg
• libgcflashplayer.so - Flash
• libpdf.so - PDF

Solution 4

Chromium now have a pdf viewer on chrome store based on pdf.js that works like a charm. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm

Solution 5

Open this terminal and run this command:

curl -O https://raw.github.com/thehodapp/bash-scripts/master/update-chromium-pdf; chmod +x update-chromium-pdf; ./update-chromium-pdf; rm update-chromium-pdf

This command downloads a script I wrote which will download the latest version of Chrome, pull out the PDF library, install it (which will require root password), and then it will delete itself. You can run this at any time to update to the latest stable version of Google's PDF library.

After running this command, make sure you restart Chromium and enable the plugin in chrome://plugins/.

View more solutions

Comments

[Srikanth]

I'll try that! =)

[Srikanth]

$ cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/ && sudo ln -s /opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so did the trick for me =) considering I still have google-chrome package ;-)

[Nemo]

Just download the google chrome deb from google.com/chrome , extract the libpdf.so from it using Archive Manager. No need to install Chrome :)

[jmort253]

@Oli - Clever! However, I just get a green screen with the words "Missing Plug-in" in the center of it. Close, but not quite. Any ideas? Thanks!

[Daniel Hershcovich]

Isn't it better to link to the plugins, so that they're updated whenever the Chrome ones are?

[Daniel Hershcovich]

for plugin in /opt/google/chrome/*.so; do sudo ln -s $plugin /usr/lib/chromium-browser/; done

[Jim Garrison]

If (like me) you would prefer to avoid non-free software, another option is using pdf.js with chromium.

[RAbraham]

4. cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/libs may work now. It seems all the *.so files are stored there. Otherwise, chromium crashes if I copy it to the chromium home directory

[pileofrocks]

That isn't the same thing at all.

[agustibr]

pdf.js can be found as a chrome extension Chrome Web Store - PDF Viewer

[Jan Hudec]

The Chrome PDF plugin is not free software, but there are several free pdf plugins that used to work just fine. They dropped the interface. -1, the information is incomplete and misleading.

[Wilf]

Note as this seems to use a 64bit package, this probably won't work properly on 32bit systems. Neat idea though :)