Getting Started

The ready-made viewer gives you a complete PDF experience with a small integration surface. Pick your stack in the sidebar; this page and every example will stay on that integration.

Installation#

Vanilla JavaScript can load the viewer directly from a CDN. Framework projects install their dedicated adapter with pnpm.

pnpm add @embedpdf/react-pdf-viewer@next

Add your first viewer#

Give the viewer a PDF URL and a height. The adapter handles the engine, plugins, toolbar, and document lifecycle for you.

import { PDFViewer } from '@embedpdf/react-pdf-viewer';

export default function App() {
  return (
    <PDFViewer
      config={{ src: 'https://snippet.embedpdf.com/ebook.pdf' }}
      style={{ height: '500px' }}
      onReady={(registry) => {
        console.log('PDF viewer ready!', registry);
      }}
    />
  );
}

Built-in stamps#

The Insert tab’s stamps panel loads the standard rubber stamps from @embedpdf/default-stamps the first time it opens — one Acrobat-compatible PDF per locale, shipped as a lazy chunk of your own build (the CDN snippet carries it in its folder), in the language negotiated from the viewer’s locale and the browser’s. Nothing is fetched from a third party. The stamps option decides where that library comes from:

stamps: {
  defaultLibrary: false;
} // no built-in library, no request (air-gapped)
stamps: {
  defaultLibrary: 'https://your.cdn/stamps/{locale}/stamps.pdf';
} // self-host

A self-hosted URL is used exactly as given. Libraries a user creates — stamps made from selected annotations, PDFs imported into the panel — are kept in the browser across reloads. For the whole picture — the engine’s WebAssembly, workers, CSP — see Self-hosting & air-gapped deployments.

Where to go next#

• Configure the toolbar and available viewer controls.
• Listen to the ready event when you need access to the plugin registry.
• Switch to the Headless docs when you want to build the entire interface yourself.