PDF.js compiled to CommonJS (no .mjs)

[a-gss]

Hello !

I am trying to make a VSCode PDF viewer. I tried mupdf before PDFjs, but in both cases the problem is that you can't use module scripts in VSCode webviews. Because PDFjs is compiled to ESM (.mjs) I'm hurting a wall.

Sorry if I mix up terms (ESM, modules, commonJS etc) i am not a js developer.

I tried a simpler thing: update the most known vscode pdf viewer https://github.com/tomoki1207/vscode-pdfviewer from version 3.x to 3.11.174 without problems. Starting with PDFjs 4.x, the build script (gulpfile.mjs) compiles PDFjs to .mjs and thus break things. I went for PDFjs 5.3.31 directly and skipped the 4.x, and got the same problem of course.

I tried to change the gulpfile to build back to commonjs, but some code wasn't compatible. Because I don't really know what I do, I prefered using a tool made by people that know what they do, so i used Babel to transpile ESM->commonJS.

First I compile PDF.js from source (git cloned and compiled from master tbh):

npm install
npx gulp generic

Then babel:

npm install --save-dev @babel/core @babel/cli @babel/preset-env
npx babel ./build/generic --out-dir ./build/commonJS --copy-files

babel.config.json looks like this:

{
  "presets": [
    [
      "@babel/preset-env",
      {
        "modules": "commonjs"
      }
    ]
  ]
}

And it kinda worked because all the .mjs are now regular .js.

Then I port the vscode viewer to 5.3.31 (this is basically 1. remove the default pdf, 2. copy paste the viewer.html in pdfPreview.ts), but it doesn't work. Opening the developper tools and the console, there is:

Uncaught SyntaxError: Cannot use 'import.meta' outside a module (pdf.worker.js:41)
Uncaught SyntaxError: Cannot use 'import.meta' outside a module (viewer.js:101)
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token 'export' (main.js:43)

So it looks like babel didn't do its work properly ? Since import look like a ESM thing to me...

---

I'm really lost here, does anyone know how I can fix this babel issue ? Or maybe there is an alternative in the PDFjs build script ?

Thank you very much for your help :-D

edit: someone suggest to use webpack (#19588 (comment)) i should give it a try maybe