Home / ubuntu / Questions / 12584
Accepted
Dima
Asked: 2010-11-11 16:08:00 +0800 CST

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

  • 772

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?

plugins pdf chromium

8 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    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.

    • 24

  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

    • 13

  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
    • 9

  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

    • 8

  5. For Ubuntu or Debian (personally tested on Debian Wheezy - 64-bit build):

    From trogdor1138's comment at archlinux site, get the google-chrome rpm:

    wget ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/sourceforge/s/sn/snowbird/yum/sb20/google-chrome-stable-30.0.1599.66-1.x86_64.rpm

    Install the cpio and rpm2cpio packages to extract the files from the downloaded rpm:

    sudo apt-get install cpio rpm2cpio

    Make a directory since the contents don't have a single directory structure (making it easier to clean back up if you like) and then extract:

    mkdir chrome
cd chrome
rpm2cpio ../google-chrome-stable-30.0.1599.66-1.x86_64.rpm | cpio -vid

    Install the libpdf.so library in your chromium's lib directory:

    For Debian (verified against my 64-bit build):

    sudo install -m644 ./opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so /usr/lib/chromium/

    For Ubuntu, I believe this is where you'd install it:

    sudo install -m644 ./opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/

    Now just restart your browser, visit chrome://plugins/ to verify it's listed, and then open a PDF! :)

    • 1

  6. 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/.

    • 1
    • 0

  8. Chromium team already set the plugin as Open Source: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=50852#c16

    So, if you install Chromium you will already see the plugin enabled with chrome://plugins/

    • 0