Changelog

Every release is also on GitHub Releases and npm. Releases follow semantic versioning; until 1.0, minor versions may include breaking changes.

0.9.1

Patch Changes

• Previews, cards and popovers fade out where they were: closing one no longer flashes it at the window’s top-left corner for a few frames.

• The transform zoom (0.9.0) is now opt-in (transformZoom, default false): zoom gestures lay the pages out at every step again, as before 0.9.0, where fixed-size parts (notes, handles, page gaps) never scale and snap back. With transformZoom on, a gesture now lands exactly where it shows (pages narrower than the view stay centered, never scrolled past the first or last page) and stays sharp while it runs (pages drawn at the zoom shown, text and annotations redrawn crisply).

0.9.0

Minor Changes

• Paper.Root takes cache (a KeyValueStore, e.g. indexedDbStore('my-app', 'papers'): a paper opened again isn’t analyzed again) and isolate. Files over 32 MB are analyzed on the rendering worker instead of a second copy (not parsed twice).

• PdfSource accepts { data, transfer: true }: the bytes are handed over to pdf.js’s worker instead of copied (the caller’s buffer is emptied), so a large PDF isn’t held twice (a 92 MB paper: ~1.4 GB → ~1.0 GB in WKWebView).

• Zoom gestures (pinch, Ctrl/⌘ + wheel, animated zooms) show as a CSS transform of the pages while they run, then lay out and draw once at the end, keeping the point under the gesture in place: 60 fps instead of ~35 on a 99-page paper in WKWebView. transformZoom (default true) turns it off.

Patch Changes

• Free what pdf.js keeps for a page (operator list, decoded images) once it leaves the render range, after a thumbnail or minimap render, and after paper analysis: an image-heavy paper no longer stays in memory whole (a 92 MB paper: ~2 GB → ~1.1 GB in WKWebView). Pages near the viewport are pinned, so thumbnails never free them.

• Importing a PDF’s annotations skips pdf-lib when pdf.js finds none to import (no supported annotation, no embedded model, not encrypted): no copy of the whole file and no main-thread parse when opening most papers.

• Figure, link, cross-reference and crop previews free their page after rendering, and render (like thumbnails) with the pages’ annotation mode: a page shown in both is no longer parsed and decoded twice. Analysis on the shown document keeps the pages on screen. PdfDocument.renderRegion takes { signal, theme }.

0.8.1

Patch Changes

• The selected color’s ring in the selection menu and annotation popover is concentric on 1x screens: there it uses whole pixels (1px halo + 2px ring, same outer size) instead of a 1.5px spread, which WebKitGTK drew lopsided. 2x screens are unchanged.

• Highlights show on Linux (WebKitGTK: Tauri, Epiphany). WebKitGTK ignores mix-blend-mode on GPU-composited canvases, so the page bitmap painted opaque over the highlight underlay (and the page tint). There, page, cached and preview canvases are now created with willReadFrequently, which keeps them in software where blending works. Other browsers are unchanged.

0.8.0

Minor Changes

• Text box fonts. A text box can be handwritten, sans, serif or mono, and the app picks the typefaces.

  • Model: FreeTextAnnotation.font.family is a FreeTextFontFamily: the new 'Handwritten', plus 'Helvetica' (sans), 'Times' (serif) and 'Courier' (mono) as before. FREETEXT_FONT_FAMILIES lists them in menu order.
  • Rendering: a text box’s font-family comes from a CSS custom property, so apps choose (and bundle) the faces: --pdf-font-handwritten (fallback: Shantell Sans if installed, else a system marker face), --pdf-font-sans (Helvetica, Arial), --pdf-font-serif (Times New Roman) and --pdf-font-mono (Courier New). freetextFontCss(family) returns that value. data-font still names the family.
  • Store: the freetextFont option (Annotations.Root prop, default 'Helvetica') is the family of new text boxes; store.setFont(ids, family) changes existing ones. The context menu of a text box has a Font submenu; its entries carry action.font (the CSS family) so menus can show each choice in its own font. New messages: font, fontHandwritten, fontHelvetica, fontTimes, fontCourier.
  • PDF: the exact family is kept in svelte-pdf-mini’s private data. /DA, /DS and the appearance stream use the closest standard font (standardFontOf): Helvetica for handwritten and sans, Times for serif, Courier for mono. The typeface itself is not embedded, so files stay small and need no font tooling.

0.7.0

Minor Changes

• Emoji notes. A note can show an emoji instead of the speech-bubble icon.

  • Model: NoteAnnotation.emoji (one grapheme). The PDF keeps it exactly in svelte-pdf-mini’s private data. /Name gets the closest standard icon (💬 Comment, 🤔 Help, 💡 Key, 📌 Note, anything else Comment, see noteIconFor), so Preview and Acrobat show a sensible icon. The appearance stream is still the colored speech bubble, because a color emoji can’t be drawn with the standard PDF fonts.
  • Store: the noteEmojis option (Annotations.Root prop) enables it, e.g. noteEmojis={defaultNoteEmojis} (💬 🤔 💡 🤯 🧐 🤨 😍 📌). When the note tool is active, or the selected (or just created) annotations are notes, keys 1–8 pick an emoji instead of a color, and store.pickingNoteEmoji is true. store.noteEmoji (bindable noteEmoji, onNoteEmojiChange) is the emoji new notes get, store.pickNoteEmoji(emoji) picks one, and store.setNoteEmoji(ids, emoji) changes notes. Without noteEmojis, nothing changes.
  • UI: Annotations.NoteEmoji is a toolbar button for one emoji. The emoji shows on the page marker (scaled with the zoom), in Annotations.Margin notes and markers, and in the default hover card and list. Snippets get it as emoji. toMarkdown writes it in place of the color. isSingleEmoji(value) validates user input.

• a9351e1 Thanks @julien-blanchon! - Colored text reads on every page theme.

  • Text boxes draw their text in an ink shade of their color (same hue and chroma, lightness at most 0.5 by day and at least 0.75 by night) instead of the pastel fill, so all eight palette colors reach 4.5:1 on light, tinted and dark pages. Text boxes now set --annotation-ink (not --annotation-color) for their text.
  • inkCss(color, dark) returns that shade for any CSS color. PaletteColor and PaperColor take optional ink / inkDark overrides; paletteInk(entry, dark) and paperInk(color, dark) resolve them, for example to pass a paper accent as --pdf-accent.

0.6.0

Minor Changes

• Saving annotations is sturdier.

  • Encrypted PDFs: PDFs with an owner password but no password to open (common for publisher PDFs) can now be saved. exportPdf decrypts them and writes a full, unencrypted copy (the owner password’s restrictions are not kept). Their foreign annotations are also read with their real text instead of ciphertext. A PDF that needs a password to open can’t be saved without stripping that protection: exportPdf throws a PdfSaveError (reason: 'password').
  • Know before annotating: saveSupport(bytes) returns { encrypted, canSave, saveBlockedReason? }; importAnnotations returns it as result.saveSupport, and AnnotationStore.saveSupport holds it after importFromPdf. importAnnotations takes a password option to read the text of a file that needs one.
  • Deleting a foreign annotation sticks: a highlight from Preview or Acrobat deleted in the 'editable' foreign mode no longer comes back on reopen. The store lists the deleted ones in removedForeign, and exportPdf’s new remove option deletes them (with their popups). store.exportPdf() passes it for you; when you call exportPdf yourself, pass { remove: store.removedForeign }. Read-only and hidden foreign annotations are kept as before.
  • Popups of every annotation the writer removes (edited foreign ones, prune: 'all') are removed with it.
  • Bytes before %PDF-: they are dropped on export, so the saved file starts with the header, and the update matches the file’s cross-reference format. When the file’s offsets count those bytes, the export is a full rewrite.
  • Paper color pickers: paperSwatches (white, warm paper and the paperColors palette, typed PaperSwatch) and paperHex(value, dark) (a swatch value or #hex → the color for pageThemes.paper) are now exported next to paperColors.

Patch Changes

• Floating parts (selection menu, annotation popover and hover card, citation card, cross-reference and link previews, backlinks) now use CSS anchor positioning: they move with the pages in the same frame as the scroll, with no lag or jitter. The selection menu now follows the selected text (it used to stay where it opened). A part hides once its anchor is scrolled out of the pages’ view, unless it holds the focus (a note being typed). The floating element no longer gets a data-side attribute.

• Links in the page show the pointer cursor in WebKit too.

0.5.0

Minor Changes

• Fixes and hardening from a review of 0.4.0.

  • Rotated pages: the text layer is rotated onto the page at 90°, 180° and 270° (pdf.js lays it out unrotated), so selection, find and copy line up with the canvas.
  • Fit modes within zoom limits: a fit wider than maxZoom (or narrower than minZoom) is clamped and stays a fit, instead of silently turning into a manual zoom that stops following the view. minZoom / maxZoom are validated (a maxZoom below minZoom is raised to it), changing them re-clamps the zoom, and an initial or controlled zoom outside them reads as clamped.
  • Text selection: boundaries on or around the end-of-content element that steering moves map to the nearest text, so a drag no longer drops a page’s selection for a frame; the selection box is only measured once the drag ends, walking just the selected text. A touch pan (pointercancel) ends the drag. Steering only resets the layers it changed, resets the ones the selection leaves, handles right-to-left text when anchoring a press in a gap, and clears its state when the last layer goes.
  • Spreads with the cover alone: page 1 has no neighbor (its side notes are no longer gap markers next to an empty cell).
  • Figures in non-English papers: text columns and running text are detected by line shape in papers that aren’t in English (French, German, CJK…); English papers are unchanged.
  • Find: ↑ / ↓ and Enter don’t step through matches while an input method (Japanese, Chinese…) is composing.
  • Previews: an open link or cross-reference preview re-renders when the reading theme changes.
  • Docs: zoom limits and zoomLocked, data-selecting, data-placement="gap", --pdf-viewport-focus-ring.

0.4.0

Minor Changes

• Selection menu placement: anchored to the box of the selected characters (not the last line, nor the text layer’s oversized helper elements), centered above it; below it when there is no room above within the pages’ area (it never covers the app’s toolbars); kept inside the view for a selection taller than it.
  • No previews while selecting: while a text selection is dragged (data-selecting on the viewport), links, citations, cross-references, backlink targets and annotations let the pointer through, so no preview or hover card opens and the selection can’t jump to an overlay’s edge.
  • Zoom limits: Viewer.Root minZoom / maxZoom (defaults 0.1 and 10) bound every way of zooming; viewer.minZoom / viewer.maxZoom expose them.
  • One focus effect: figures, tables and equations get the filled pulse, like references and citations; jumping to a note from Annotations.List scrolls to it and selects it, without a flash.
  • Find: ↓ / ↑ in Find.Input go to the next / previous match (as Enter / Shift+Enter).
  • No focus ring around the document: the viewport keeps keyboard focus without an outline (--pdf-viewport-focus-ring brings one back).
  • Side notes in spreads and grids: a page with another page beside it on the notes side (spreads, Auto’s grid, horizontal strips) shows markers just past its edge, painted above the neighbor, never full notes over it; thumbnail-sized pages show markers too. New viewer.hasNeighbor(page, side).
  • Box labels shrink with the page when zoomed out.
  • A box with only a label (drawn on the box) gets no side note, line marker or hover card.
  • Previews follow the reading theme: cross-reference and link previews render with the pages’ theme (night recoloring, tint, page color), not pdf.js’s white page. renderRegionToCanvas takes a theme.
  • Viewer.Root zoomLocked: user zooming (pinch, wheel, shortcuts, zoomTo, zoom mode changes) does nothing while set; a fit mode keeps fitting the view.
  • Figure, table and equation regions (reviewed on 35 papers): display equations are the whole run of math rows around their number, as wide as their column (multi-line align included, intro and following text excluded); figures and tables are widened to their text column when they nearly fill it, padded, and limited to their half for side-by-side or wrapped (wrapfigure) ones; clipped images are measured by their clip (a cropped strip no longer swallows the next figure); a region never runs into another figure’s caption; tables and algorithms end at their closing rule; algorithms read their body below the header; figures with no graphics found take the blank band above their caption. Chart labels like “(13×)” are no longer read as equation numbers.
  • Text selection in WebKit (Safari, the macOS desktop webview): a drag over the gaps between lines no longer jumps to the start or end of the page (WebKit bug 307340): the text layer’s end element follows the selection’s moving end while dragging (as in pdf.js’s viewer), and a press in a gap anchors the selection just before the nearest text, as in Chromium.

0.3.0

Minor Changes

• Styles live in a cascade layer. styles.css and every component style sit in @layer svelte-pdf-mini, so any unlayered app CSS, and Tailwind utilities once the layer order is declared, override them (class="overflow-hidden" on Thumbnails.Root now wins). With Tailwind v4, declare @layer theme, base, svelte-pdf-mini, components, utilities; in your HTML <head>, before any stylesheet loads (see README › Styling).

  • New svelte-pdf-mini/pdf-codec entry point: read and write annotations in PDF files (importAnnotations, exportPdf, JSON / Markdown serializers) without the Svelte components.
  • Clipboard: setClipboard({ text, rich, image }) routes every copy through your writer (e.g. a desktop app’s native clipboard); copyText() and hasCustomClipboard() are exported.
  • Ink smoothing: Annotations.Root inkSmoothing ('smooth' default, 'steady', 'pen', 'raw') and the smoothStroke() helper; the live stroke shows the same smoothing.
  • Shortcuts anywhere: Viewer.Root keyboard="document" listens outside the viewport too (not in text fields, dialogs or menus); viewer.isStrayKey(e) tells apps which keys are the viewer’s.
  • Side notes fit tight windows: Annotations.Margin narrows notes (minWidth now 140) and, when the room beside the page is short, lets them cover the page’s blank margin (never its text) before falling back to markers.
  • Hover cards: no card for a box with only a label (it’s drawn on the box) or over a side note (it already shows the note); cards open at their final size (notes render during the hover delay, and rendered notes come from a cache).
  • forceMount parts skip the default pop-in animation, so an app’s own transition no longer runs on top of it.
  • One hover style for links in the text: citations, cross-references and labels mentioned elsewhere share --pdf-ref-hover (replaces --pdf-citation-hover, --pdf-crossref-hover, --pdf-backlink-hover and --pdf-backlink-line).
  • Highlights under the text: highlights are drawn between the page bitmap and the text (blend multiply by day, lighten by night), so glyphs stay crisp and dark.
  • Zooming with a text selection keeps it; resizing the view (e.g. a side panel opening) keeps the reading position, and a document scrolled to the very top stays there.
  • Viewer.LinkLayer’s child gets a links snippet to render the hotspots inside your element.
  • SelectionMenuSnippetProps and PopoverSnippetProps are exported.
  • Breaking: the deprecated viewer.backStack, forwardStack, canGoBack and canGoForward are gone; use viewer.history.back, .forward, .canGoBack, .canGoForward.

  Fixes:

  • Paper.Backlinks no longer loops (effect_update_depth_exceeded) when its card opens a second time.
  • Edits to imported annotations without a /M date are written on export (they were kept as the original).
  • Switching documents mid-load no longer leaks the stale load in the shared worker; back/forward history is cleared; late annotation imports, re-anchoring results and reference metadata for the previous document are dropped; an edit made while re-anchoring runs is kept.
  • Resize handles move the right edge on rotated pages; back/forward and restorePosition land correctly on rotated or cropped pages; the reading point and minimap markers handle /Rotate and crop boxes.
  • Uncontrolled annotation lists are plain arrays again (not deep $state proxies), so structuredClone, IndexedDB and postMessage accept them.
  • Discarding one markup of a multi-page selection keeps the others undoable.
  • Outlined ellipses and polygons are hit on their outline, not their bounding box.
  • onOpenChange fires on changes only (not on mount) and doesn’t re-run on what the callback reads.
  • Leaks: canvases of cancelled renders, a progressive render landing on a released page, failed operator lists cached forever, thumbnails of a previous document, the analysis worker when opening its copy fails, window listeners of a drag interrupted by unmount, abort listeners in provider waits.
  • One caller aborting a shared provider request no longer fails the other callers.
  • Link URLs that pdf.js rejects as unsafe are no longer exposed in paper.links.
  • Find stops reading pages once it reaches its match limit.
  • Notes: “$5 and $10” is no longer typeset as maths; links in notes open in a new tab through a DOMPurify hook.
  • Author detection keeps names such as “Metallinou” or “Brainard”.
  • Keyboard: citation, cross-reference and link hotspots open their previews on focus; side notes are role="group" with a label.
  • configurePdf warns when worker settings arrive after the first document; a later bitmapCacheBytes resizes the cache.

0.2.0

Minor Changes

• 2710500 Thanks @julien-blanchon! - - Equations: numbered display equations (“… (3)”) are detected as figures of kind equation (box, label, caption), so they get previews, “Box it”, “Copy as image” and backlinks. “Eq. (3)” references resolve to them. Paper.Figures lists them when kinds includes 'equation'.
  • Backlinks: paper.mentions maps every figure / table / equation / section to the cross-references pointing at it; Paper.Layer adds hover targets on labels (“Figure 3”, “(2)”, headings) and the new Paper.Backlinks card lists each mention with its sentence (click to jump). Figures get a “Mentions” submenu in contextActions. Figures have a new labelRect.
  • Right-clicking a text selection no longer clears it.
  • A wheel over a link preview scrolls the document (and closes the preview) instead of what is behind it.
  • The annotation popover only offers the markup styles allowed by tools.
  • Rounded page corners clip GPU-composited canvases in WebKit (clip-path).

Patch Changes

• 2710500 Thanks @julien-blanchon! - - Annotations.Root takes tools: the tools / text markups an app offers. Others get no shortcut, selection-menu or context-menu entry, and are left out of the shortcut list.

  • Highlights are translucent (--pdf-highlight-opacity, default 0.45) as well as blended, so text stays readable where WebKit doesn’t blend over a GPU canvas, and they cover the line slightly beyond the glyph box.
  • Rounded page frames no longer show a white rim: the page box takes the page theme’s colour.
  • No more binding_property_non_reactive dev warnings.
  • Off-screen text layers (and all of them while a zoom animates) use content-visibility: hidden, skipping their layout.

• 2710500 Thanks @julien-blanchon! - contextActions accepts saveFile(blob, name) so desktop webviews (which ignore <a download>) can route “Save as PNG” through a native save dialog. New canvasToPng() helper.

• 2710500 Thanks @julien-blanchon! - Viewer.Root takes focusHighlight: the effect used when a link lands on a figure, table or section (default 'pulse'), including custom recipe names rendered through Viewer.Focus’s child.

• 2710500 Thanks @julien-blanchon! - Docs: optimizeDeps: { exclude: ['pdfjs-dist'] } is required in Vite apps; without it vite dev fails to load the pdf.js worker (?url) during dependency pre-bundling.

• 2710500 Thanks @julien-blanchon! - Fix: no text layer, selection or search in WKWebView (macOS 26 system webview, e.g. Tauri apps). pdf.js 6 iterates ReadableStreams with for await, which WKWebView doesn’t ship yet; the standard iterator is now installed when missing, on the main thread and in the pdf.js worker.

• 2710500 Thanks @julien-blanchon! - Zoom performance: while a zoom animates, text layers leave rendering (display: none under [data-zooming]), so their spans aren’t re-styled and re-laid out every frame (WebKit p95 frame time 31 → 24 ms, Chromium layout time ÷5).

0.1.1

Patch Changes

• 596b63f Thanks @julien-blanchon! - Fixes and polish:

  • pdf.js is loaded lazily again (it was pulled into the initial bundle by a static import), and configurePdf({ workerPort }) works with the shared worker.
  • The hand (“Pan”) tool now drags the pages to scroll, with grab / grabbing cursors; the minimap shows a grabbing cursor while scrubbing.
  • Keyboard navigation: arrow keys move between annotations again after selecting a read-only one; outline items without a target stay focusable (aria-disabled); Toc.Tree parents expose aria-expanded.
  • Screen-reader announcements and annotation kind names can be translated through messages.

• 596b63f Thanks @julien-blanchon! - Every user-facing label can now be translated through messages (annotation, citation-card, reference, link-preview and outline labels that were still hard-coded English).

0.1.0

Minor Changes

• 8341e9a Thanks @julien-blanchon! - First public release: headless PDF viewer and research-paper reader components for Svelte 5 (viewer, find, outline, thumbnails, minimap, annotations with PDF round trip, citations, tables of contents, context menus and shortcuts).