3d PDF support

[johnyf]

It would be nice to have 3d interactive object support in this viewer: http://www.3dpdfconsortium.org/

As of now incorporating this feature would make it (apparently) the first open source PDF viewer to render 3d pdf graphics. Currently only Adobe Acrobat and some proprietary viewers only support 3d viewing capabilities, which severely limits use of 3d content (coupled with the relatively involved ways of incorporating 3d content via non-proprietary methods).

Moreover, if pdf.js provided this capability, it would allow standalone websites (i.e., irrespective of browser/system) to display 3d PDF content, platfrom-independently.

Some related links may be of interest: http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/~cignoni/newvcglib/html/ http://threejs.org/

[jfbucas]

Yes, this is would definitely make a difference because the Linux version of Adobe Reader has no 3D support.

Currently, the only solution to see 3D PDF on Linux is to install Adobe Reader 9 for Windows (which is not supported anymore) using Wine (which of course is not supported at all).

[yurydelendik]

Implementing this might take time -- it's different specification U3D http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-363%204th%20Edition.pdf . If somebody will point to a lightweight and properly licensed library for web browsers, it will be easy to add annotations that will call this library for display.

[timvandermeij]

For reference, here are some examples of 3D PDFs: http://www.pdf3d.com/gallery.php. Note that even Adobe Acrobat cannot open all of them, so implementing this will be tough. I'm also doubting how many people actually use this. Most of the PDFs are even quite slow in Acrobat, so I'm not really confident that JS will be able to do a better job. Nevertheless feel free to implement this feature and submit a PR for it.

[jimbowatusi]

I was excited to see this as an open issue. Has there been any movement on it?

[timvandermeij]

Not yet. This is a very complicated and not frequently used feature, so I doubt it will be implemented soon. However, anyone willing to work on this is invited to submit a PR.

[Huespal]

More than year has passed. News about this? I'm waiting for this to be a reality on the web. Big cloud companies are not rendering 3D PDF's in browsers and I can not understand why.

[yurydelendik]

I can not understand why.

I mentioned above 3D part is not part of PDF32000 specification, but defined in different specification http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-363%204th%20Edition.pdf . The market is small for this feature, but we will be glad to consider integrating a plugin or some external library that will render U3D (that PDF.js can extract from a PDF) into generic demo viewer.

[yurydelendik]

Somebody want's to try https://github.com/Lorti/webgl-3d-model-viewer-using-three.js ?

[VBmgk]

I tried this project and it rendered just fine on Firefox Quantum 59.0.2 64-bit (but not on Google Chrome 63.0.3239.84 ...) @yurydelendik is there a way to view 3d pdfs using this nowadays?

[stealth1024]

Somebody want's to try https://github.com/Lorti/webgl-3d-model-viewer-using-three.js ? It is very different but NOT an answer to this issue. I have used three.js, it is based on the latest WebGL technology and good for .obj/.stl files, but the 3D model here is embedded into a pdf file and the format is no opened.

[Snuffleupagus]

As mentioned above, see e.g. https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/3254#issuecomment-330267767, this isn't actually part of the PDF specification and it also seem to be a somewhat niche feature still; all-in-all this seems unlikely to be implemented in PDF.js and thus WONTFIX is probably appropriate here.

[johnyf]

In case it is decided at a future time to implement this functionality, then this issue could be reopened.