Google-chrome – How to view properties of a PDF document opened in Chromium-based web browser

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Standalone PDF viewers such as SumatraPDF, MuPDF, Okular or PDFX-Change Editor allow to display PDF metadata and properties such as used fonts, size, date of creation, author etc., typically with a Ctrl + D hotkey.

However, I cannot figure out how to obtain the same info from the embedded PDF viewer in any of the Chromium-based web browsers. So far I tried Google Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi and none of them seem to provide this feature out of the box.

Pressing Ctrl + D obviously doesn't work in browsers (adds page to bookmarks), and there is no UI elements to click on in order to retrieve the PDF metadata.

Is it possible to view properties of a PDF document without saving and reopening it in a standalone viewer?

Best Answer

As a workaround, one can substitute Chromium PDF viewer with Mozilla's PDF.js via corresponding extension. In this case, by clicking Tools -> Document Properties... one can retrieve basic info:

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There are few downsides I think worth mentioning:

  • Overall performance is subjectively worse (even with enabled WebGL). Scrolling and scaling are slower, font rendering is somewhat choppy.
  • Chromium's yellow tick marks on the scrollbar won't show up when searching the PDF document.
  • Address bar is populated with an uninformative chrome-extention://... string instead of the actual URL.
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