# Building PDFium ## Prerequisites Get the chromium depot tools via the instructions at http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/install-depot-tools (this provides the gclient utilty needed below). Also install Python, Subversion, and Git and make sure they're in your path. Optionally, you may want to install the [Ninja](http://martine.github.io/ninja/) build system (recommended) rather than using your platform-specific build system. ## Get the code ``` mkdir pdfium cd pdfium gclient config --name . --unmanaged https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium.git gclient sync ``` ## Generate the build files Now we use the GYP library to generate the build files. At this point, you have two options. The first option is to use the [Ninja] (http://martine.github.io/ninja/) build system. This is the default as of mid-September, 2015. Previously, the second option was the default. Most PDFium developers use Ninja, as does our [continuous build system] (http://build.chromium.org/p/client.pdfium/). On Windows: `build\gyp_pdfium ` For all other platforms: `build/gyp_pdfium ` The second option is to generate platform-specific build files, i.e. Makefiles on Linux, sln files on Windows, and xcodeproj files on Mac. To do so, set the GYP\_GENERATORS environment variable appropriately (e.g. "make", "msvs", or "xcode") before running the above command. ## Building the code If you used Ninja, you can build the sample program by: `ninja -C out/Debug pdfium_test ` You can build the entire product (which includes a few unit tests) by: `ninja -C out/Debug ` If you're not using Ninja, then building is platform-specific. On Linux: `make pdfium_test ` On Mac, open build/all.xcodeproj On Windows, open build\all.sln ## Running the sample program The pdfium\_test program supports reading, parsing, and rasterizing the pages of a .pdf file to .ppm or .png output image files (windows supports two other formats). For example: `out/Debug/pdfium_test --ppm path/to/myfile.pdf ` ## Waterfall The current health of the source tree can be found at http://build.chromium.org/p/client.pdfium/console ## Branches There is a branch for a forthcoming feature called XFA that you can get by following the steps above, then: `git checkout origin/xfa build/gyp_pdfium ninja -C out/Debug `