Approach to importing in web/ folder makes it complicated to use the files without needless dependencies

Hi, following what one of my users of React-PDF reported in wojtekmaj/react-pdf#183, I’d like to ask you if there’s no better way of importing utils than via the following line:

import { createPromiseCapability } from 'pdfjs-lib';

This is an example from ui_utils.js. If I happen to use ui_utils.js somewhere (in my case by using pdf_link_service.js), it causes the whole, big tree of imports to be created just to get this one function out. If that file imported createPromiseCapability directly from util.js, there wouldn’t be a problem - just one function would be imported where it should, without side effects.

Do you think that’s something that could be solved?

Thanks!

[dschissler]

For the last 2.5 years I’ve been hoping that pdf.js would be able to function as a typical node.js package that bundles itself up for the browser using either browserify or webpack. That would probably mean that there are additional subprojects for each of those bundling techniques (or just let me worry about that and to supply my own core-js, etc). I find that pdf.js doesn’t work correctly whatever I do and I end up spending 1-2 days on each major upgrade. I have to try a lot of very hacky stuff to get any results. It seems like there is requirejs (AMD?) stuff, wepback stuff but built with gulp. If I try to source the pdf.js source libraries directly in webpack then I’ll have problems. To some up, I’m quite impressed with pdf.js as a technology but the packaging is just weird, difficult and problematic. The changes over the recent versions are just different kinds of weird, difficult and problematic.

[wojtekmaj]

I’ll happily untangle more modules. 😃