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up vote 21 down vote favorite
4

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?

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2  
Not really an answer, so I'll leave it as a comment... You might be interested in this extension: Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (by Google) – andrewsomething Nov 11 '10 at 0:29
Can't you use the Evince plugin in Chromium? – JanC Nov 11 '10 at 10:56
@JanC, well, I can't seem to find any Evince plugin for Chromium...so unless it actually exists, I would say no. (Although I would love find it if it does exist). – Leif Andersen Jan 23 '11 at 23:48
Newer versions of Firefox have a built-in PDF viewer, too. – Flimm Mar 8 at 13:03

3 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

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.

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up vote 9 down vote

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

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I'll try that! =) – Dima Nov 11 '10 at 1:43
6  
$ cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/ && sudo ln -s /opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so did the trick for me =) considering I still have google-chrome package ;-) – Dima Nov 11 '10 at 22:03
4  
Just download the google chrome deb from google.com/chrome , extract the libpdf.so from it using Archive Manager. No need to install Chrome :) – Capt.Nemo Oct 11 '11 at 6:36
@Oli - Clever! However, I just get a green screen with the words "Missing Plug-in" in the center of it. Close, but not quite. Any ideas? Thanks! – jmort253 Jan 18 '12 at 2:32
up vote 5 down vote

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
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Isn't it better to link to the plugins, so that they're updated whenever the Chrome ones are? – Daniel Hershcovich Jun 18 '12 at 18:45
for plugin in /opt/google/chrome/*.so; do sudo ln -s $plugin /usr/lib/chromium-browser/; done – Daniel Hershcovich Jun 18 '12 at 18:45

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