How to Build an Angular Image Viewer with PSPDFKit

In this post, we provide you with a step-by-step guide on how you can deploy PSPDFKit’s Angular Image Viewer. Angular is a TypeScript web application framework developed by Google, and according to the Stack Overflow 2021 Developer Survey, it’s the web’s third-most popular framework.

What Is an Angular Image Viewer?

An Angular image viewer lets you render and view images in a web browser without the need to download it to your hard drive or use an external application like an image reader.

PSPDFKit Angular Image Viewer

We offer a commercial Angular image viewer library that can easily be integrated into your web application. Our Angular viewer supports rendering JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and PDF files in any modern browser and on any mobile device without any plugins.

It comes with 30+ features that let you view, annotate, edit, and sign documents directly in your browser. Out of the box, it has a polished and flexible UI that you can extend or simplify based on your unique use case.

• A prebuilt and polished UI for an improved user experience
• 15+ prebuilt annotation tools to enable document collaboration
• Browser-based text editing, page cropping, merging, rotating, and more
• Support for more file types with client-side PDF, MS Office, and image viewing
• Dedicated support from engineers to speed up integration

Example of Our Angular Image Viewer

To see our image viewer in action, upload a JPG, PNG, or TIFF file by selecting Choose Example > Open Document. Once your image is displayed in the viewer, you can try drawing freehand, adding a note, or applying a crop or an e-signature.

Requirements to Get Started

To get started, you’ll need:

• The latest version of Node.js.

• A package manager for installing the Angular command-line interface (CLI) and importing packages. You can use npm or Yarn.

💡 Tip: When you install Node.js, npm is installed by default.

Setup

Go to your terminal and install the Angular CLI. This will help you get up and running quickly with Angular:

npm install -g @angular/cli

yarn global add @angular/cli

Now, you can check the version of Angular:

ng version

Creating a New Angular Project

Now you’ll see how to integrate PSPDFKit into your Angular project.

First, create a new Angular project for PSPDFKit integration:

ng new pspdfkit-web-example-angular

This will ask some configuration questions. Choose No for routing and CSS for the stylesheet. Now, change your directory to this project:

cd pspdfkit-web-example-angular

Adding PSPDFKit

Install pspdfkit as a dependency with npm or yarn:

npm install pspdfkit

yarn add pspdfkit

Now, add the following to your angular.json file. Angular will copy the PSPDFKit library assets to the assets directory before running your app:

"assets": [
 "src/favicon.ico",
	"src/assets",
+   {
+  	"glob": "**/*",
+		"input": "./node_modules/pspdfkit/dist/pspdfkit-lib/",
+		"output": "./assets/pspdfkit-lib/"
+	}
]

Displaying the PDF

Add the image you want to display to the src/assets directory. You can use our demo image as an example.

1. Replace the contents of app.component.html with the following:

<div class="app">
	<div class="toolbar">
		<img class="logo" src="/favicon.ico" height="32" alt="logo" />

		PSPDFKit Angular Application
	</div>

	<!-- We'll mount the PSPDFKit UI to this element. -->
	<div class="pspdfkit-container"></div>
</div>

2. Replace the contents of app.component.ts with the following:

import { Component } from "@angular/core";
import PSPDFKit from "pspdfkit";

@Component({
  selector: "app-root",
  templateUrl: "./app.component.html",
  styleUrls: ["app.component.css"],
})
export class AppComponent {
  title = "PSPDFKit for Web Angular Example";

  ngAfterViewInit(): void {
    PSPDFKit.load({
		// Use the assets directory URL as a base URL. PSPDFKit will download its library assets from here.
      baseUrl: location.protocol + "//" + location.host + "/assets/",
      document: "/assets/image.png",
      container: ".pspdfkit-container",
      licenseKey: "YOUR_LICENSE_KEY_GOES_HERE", // Optional license key.
    }).then((instance) => {
      // For the sake of this demo, store the PSPDFKit for Web instance
      // on the global object so that you can open the dev tools and
      // play with the PSPDFKit API.

      (<any>window).instance = instance;
    });
  }
}

The license key is optional; however, you may see a watermark on your images without a key. To get a key, contact sales.

If you try to run your project, you may get an error stating the mounting container has no height. To fix this issue, add the following styles to the src/app/app.component.css file:

:host {
	height: 100%;
}

.app {
	position: fixed;
	width: 100%;
	height: 100%;
	top: 0;
	right: 0;
	bottom: 0;
	left: 0;
}

.toolbar {
	position: relative;
	display: flex;
	align-items: center;
	height: 64px;
	width: 100%;
	padding: 0 24px;
	box-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);
	font-family: sans-serif;
	font-size: 20px;
	font-weight: 500;
	color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8);
}

.logo {
	margin-right: 20px;
}

.pspdfkit-container {
	height: calc(100% - 64px);
}

Start the app and open it in your default browser:

npm start

yarn start

Interact with the sandbox by clicking the left rectangle icon and selecting Editor > Show Default Layout. To edit, sign in with GitHub — click the rectangle icon again and choose Sign in. To preview the result, click the rectangle icon once more and choose Editor > Embed Preview. For the full example, click the Open Editor button. Enjoy experimenting with the project!

Adding Even More Capabilities

Once you’ve deployed your viewer, you can start customizing it to meet your specific requirements or easily add more capabilities. To help you get started, here are some of our most popular Angular guides:

• Adding annotations
• Editing documents
• Filling PDF forms
• Adding signatures to documents
• Real-time collaboration
• Redaction
• UI customization

Conclusion

You should now have our Angular image viewer up and running in your web application. If you hit any snags, don’t hesitate to reach out to our Support team for help.

We created similar how-to blog posts using different web frameworks and libraries:

• How to Build a JavaScript Image Viewer with PSPDFKit
• How to Build a jQuery Image Viewer with PSPDFKit
• How to Build a React Image Viewer with PSPDFKit

To see a list of all web frameworks, start your free trial. Or, launch our demo to see our viewer in action.