Future of the project

[DImuthuUpe]

Dear AndroidPdfViewer developers and users,

There is no doubt that this project is the prominent open-source PDF library available for Android right now. However, it has not actively been developed and upgraded in the last 5 years. As a result of that, we can see lots of detached forks and developers ended up living in their own islands. After a brief discussion with @barteksc who is the founder of this project, we decided to transfer the ownership of the project to my GitHub account and I working as the maintainer for the upcoming future.

Given all of that, I need your help to bring the project back on track including addressing bug fixes, feature improvements, and compatibility support for the latest Android environments. I am tagging a few developers who sent some recent PRs to the project just to have the discussion going on. Anyone who is interested in contributing to the project can comment here. Let's build a pool of community and share the responsibility to revive this awesome project.

@lion1988dev @tamalmaity90

[odmfl]

@DImuthuUpe You also need to update pdfium.There are tons of forks, some have even added interesting things. As done in other forks, one could merge pdfium into the same project. I don't know if it would be more useful.

I'll leave you some pdfium/pdfviewer projects where text search has been implemented.

https://github.com/TEA-ebook/AndroidPdfViewer (search, selection and highlighting should work here)

https://github.com/Lesmm/AndroidPdfViewer/tree/develop ( in this branch search and selection works)

https://gitlab.com/mudlej_android/mj_pdf_reader (in this app the search and text section works, changes have been made to pdfium and pdfviewer)

I advise you to try the changes in the first link because the sample project does not exist and has not been tested, but it may work better than the others.

We need an updated and supported library, thanks for your work

[odmfl]

for pdfium I still recommend this https://github.com/marain87/PdfiumAndroid

[lisonge]

If you want to seek help from contributors.

I think that this open-source project might be better managed under an organization account than under an individual account.

Maybe you could create a new GitHub organization account to manage it.

[DUWENINK]

Greeeeeeeet!

[Acoee]

Wow, so can we migrate to AndroidX now?

[xRamazaNx]

https://github.com/TEA-ebook/AndroidPdfViewer (search, selection and highlighting should work here)

P.S. This fork misreads large PDF files. A file that has many pages is not scrolled to the last page

[odmfl]

https://github.com/TEA-ebook/AndroidPdfViewer (search, selection and highlighting should work here)

P.S. This fork misreads large PDF files. A file that has many pages is not scrolled to the last page

Thanks for the test, leaving aside the problem of large pdfs. I wanted to ask you do other things like search, selection and highlighting work in that fork?

[xRamazaNx]

Thanks for the test, leaving aside the problem of large pdfs. I wanted to ask you do other things like search, selection and highlighting work in that fork?

Text selection works with a long press, it is colored blue and can be copied. But i didn't test the search because I abandoned the library after detect the problem. This fork has exactly the same problem -> https://github.com/Lesmm/AndroidPdfViewer/tree/develop

[odmfl]

Thanks for the test, leaving aside the problem of large pdfs. I wanted to ask you do other things like search, selection and highlighting work in that fork?

Text selection works with a long press, it is colored blue and can be copied. But i didn't test the search because I abandoned the library after detect the problem. This fork has exactly the same problem -> https://github.com/Lesmm/AndroidPdfViewer/tree/develop

I had already read elsewhere about the problem of large PDF , should be a pdfium problem. Could you add "sample" to that fork ( tea ebook) to be able to create a test apk? So we can do some tests to try to fix the problem

[xRamazaNx]

Could you add "sample" to that fork ( tea ebook) to be able to create a test apk?

Yes i'll do it in a few days.

[DImuthuUpe]

Thanks, @xRamazaNx and @odmfl for taking the initiative. We can use that fork as the basis and merge those back to the main repo once we know that it is stable.

[xRamazaNx]

@odmfl I added an app sample module here https://github.com/xRamazaNx/AndroidPdfViewer. In my tests, the scrolling issue starts on page 1124.

[odmfl]

@odmfl I added an app sample module here https://github.com/xRamazaNx/AndroidPdfViewer. In my tests, the scrolling issue starts on page 1124.

I did some tests, the problem only occurs in portrait mode, in landscape mode all pages are displayed. I'll do more tests.

The text selection is not optimal, it was better in the other one. In this one, however, you can copy the text.

Is search not enabled or not available? In the other there was

[yd-threra-and]

@DImuthuUpe,

Thank you for taking over the maintenance of this library. We have encountered a critical issue when using the library on an Android 15 emulator with 16 KB page sizes. We have raised a new issue with all the details here.

This problem is crucial for our project as we prepare for future releases on the Play Store. Additionally, it is expected to affect existing apps targeting earlier Android versions when running on future Android 15 devices with 16 KB page sizes. Any updates or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your continued efforts in maintaining and improving this library.

[stevenzeck]

If you want to seek help from contributors.

I think that this open-source project might be better managed under an organization account than under an individual account.

Maybe you could create a new GitHub organization account to manage it.

I would also suggest an organization account. Because this project has not been maintained, there are a lot of forks (and forks of forks), and it's hard to know which one is "official".

Also, will this be available through Maven Central? I've found that jitpack.io is often unreliable.

[smarru]

I started a new issue to solicit interest to move to an open source organization. Please chime in there, if there is a quorum, we can construct a proposal and start the process - https://github.com/DImuthuUpe/AndroidPdfViewer/issues/1195

[DImuthuUpe]

Thanks @smarru. I vote for moving this project to Apache Software Foundation. It will help the project in long term and we can build a contributor pool with the help of ASF

[mickael-menu]

I'm not sure that moving an unmaintained project into ASF will help much.

In my opinion you should start by creating a neutral GitHub organization, have a bunch of fork maintainers and willing contributors as co-maintainers and let people organize themselves. I did such a thing for one of my projects and it worked wonders.

While I appreciate you trying to revive the project @DImuthuUpe, it seems that so far the only change has been a transfer of ownership. I understand some people may be hesitant to get involved until they see active development happening again and a clear direction for the project.

[ramu2514]

I have made so many enhancements on top of this projects.

I made search, highlight, annotations etc working.... I am happy to contribute if you would mark this source code AGPL.

[diasjakupov]

Hello! @DImuthuUpe, is it possible to transfer this great library to mavenRepository?

[YMonnier]

Hello @DImuthuUpe Could you provide an update on the status of this initiative? I would be interested in contributing as well.

[stevenzeck]

It's not looking like this project is moving forward. Google is working on a Jetpack PDF viewer: https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/releases/pdf, though device support is going to be limited to SDK 31 and above.