Need help on rendering PDF using CGPDFContext. I am currently using UIWebView to display PDF but would like to perform much more operation rather than just reading like Highlight Text, Search PDF, Annotate PDF. Not looking for using any Framework or library.
Any help will be beneficial. For a start, code on how to render PDF using CGPDF and displaying it instead of using UIWebView.
PDF annotations are a rabbit hole. I've been working on them since 2010. The spec is thousands of pages. It's easy to get started but it takes forever to get right with all the PDFs and variations out there. Even a simple feature like bookmarks are harder than you would think.
To date there's no open source framework that implements PDF annotations. The above linked one can be a good starting point. If you don't have months/years to build something on your own, there are a few commercial options available - like PSPDFKit, available for iOS, Android and Web, which I am building.
We have a guide article listing the most important PDF spec documents.
Searching is another tricky topic. It's quite hard to convert the PDF text data to unicode. The Adobe CIDFont spec is a good starting point.
You shoud try VFReader, it is an open source project for rendering PDF files on iOS. It can be a good starting point.
Related
Quick question, that I haven't found a solid answer yet.
Is it possible to generate a PDF in iOS that includes layers, which can then be removed/separated in Photoshop?
What I'm trying to achieve is take a picture with the camera of the phone, then place text over it, submit it as pdf to a customer and then have the customer read the text and remove it.
I can do everything except the layering of the pdf and I have found some hints that this isn't possible to do with the standard iOS library, but I wanted to know if anyone has come across this before.
Thank you.
The standard iOS API for creating PDF files cannot create layers (optional content) in a PDF page.
This library IFXPDFFactory seems to be able to generate PDF files with layers.
PoDoFo and libHaru can also be used to generate PDF files on iOS but I do not know if they support layers.
We have a document management system written in PHP that uses mPDF to generate rather complex PDFs. We grew to love it, and mPDF allowed us to:
Use HTML/CSS to style the pages
Produce 200+ Page Documents
Support alternating Portrait/Landscape pages throughout the document
Automatically generate Multi-Level PDF Bookmarks
Import 3rd-party PDFs into the document
We want the new version of the system to be writen on Ruby on Rails, and for that we would need a Ruby PDF Generation alternative. We checked out Prawn, PDFKit, Wicked PDF, and Prince XML, but reading their docs (which are often one page worth), I'm not sure if they are as feature-full as mPDF. They seem to go for the "Easy of Use" rather than functionality.
Is there a PDF Generator for Ruby that is as advanced as mPDF, or should be keep PDF generation PHP-based as it is?
mPDF seems to be a composite tool that uses a portable PDF lib and an html2pdf converter.
it's hard to compare those to the libs/tools you mentioned. PrinceXML should be similar to html2pdf, but you could also use wkhtml2pdf (PDFKit, WicketPDF), which uses webkit and is free of charge.
combining those with prawn, which would translate to FPDF in PHP, should do everything you need.
You might want to look at Docmosis which has a Ruby example in the sample code for talking to their Document engine. The templating capabilities are pretty good and I've seen it producing large documents. I don't think it can stitch/import PDFs so you would have to use it with another library that can do the combining.
Please note I work with the company that produces Docmosis.
I am a newbie in iPhone development. I am planning to do a PDF application for iPhone. The functionality is:
User will type their input in a text field (which is going to be the content of the PDF file).
I have to modify the PDF file through code while saving (paragraphs, tables, bullets etc).
User can save it in their own name.
User can send the PDF file as attachment of MFMailComposer.
So I have searched and got many links. However I didn't find any leading details to create and modify a PDF file in iPhone/iPad.
Can anyone please provide me a good reference to do this. Are there any alternatives to do this?
I've used this reference: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/drawingwithquartz2d/dq_pdf/dq_pdf.html
It contains theoretical explanations and source code examples
Please use the below link to download sample apps for PDF Reader/Viewer in iOS
PDF Reader/Viewer in iOS
Also please look at detail about pdf creation, manipulation etc in below links
developer.apple: PDF Document Creation, Viewing, and Transforming
Fast-and-lean-pdf-viewer-for-iphone
If you were doing a Phonegap app I'd say got for jsPDF, which would enable you to create (basic) PDF files in Javascript. I don't do Obj-C, but a quick look on SO provides good links.
I'm creating a document viewing web application. You log in and it takes you to a screen where you have all your docs listed on the left. I want to make it so that when you roll over a document a preview of the document shows up on the right. From there you can click on it for a full view and printing capabilities. I'm not asking how to do all that but I'm wondering what the best way would be to go about rendering the preview of the document. The documents are all going to be pdfs and stored on a server. I'm working in asp.net 3.5 mvc in visual studios 2008.
For creating the PDF preview, first have a look at some other discussions on the subject on StackOverflow:
How can I take preview of documents?
Get a preview jpeg of a pdf on windows?
If these don't answer your question, you can try a couple more things:
You can get a commercial renderer (PDFViewForNet, PDFRasterizer.NET, ABCPDF, ActivePDF, ...).
Most are fairly expensive though, especially if all you care about is making thumbnails.
There is a CodeProject article that shows how to use the Adobe ActiveX, but it may be out of date, easily broken by new releases and its legality is murky.
Install GhostScript on the server and request rendered thumbnails of any page from it.
I did a small project that you will find on the Developer Express forums as an attachment.
Be careful of the license requirements for GhostScript through.
I use it for an internal software and it's working pretty well.
Hope this helps.
Here
I render the jpeg thumbnails of the first page of the pdf document when a file is uploaded.
When the user clicks he can download the document (or open them direcly in the browser) to read and print them.
Update: to create the thumbnails I used a .net component called PDFView4NET from O2Solutions
Is it possible to search "words" in pdf files with delphi?
I have code with which I can search in many others files like (exe, dll, txt) but it doesn't work with pdf files.
It depends on the structure of the specific PDF.
If the pdf is made of images (scanned pages) then you have to OCR each image and build a full text index inside the PDF. (To see if its image based, open it with notepad and look for obj tags full of random chars). There are a few utilities and apps that do this kind of work for you, CVision PDF Compressor is one that I have used before.
If the pdf is a standard PDF, then you should be able to open it like any other text file and search for the words.
Here is page that will detail some of the structure of a PDF. This a SO post for the same.
The components/libraries mentioned in the answer to this question should do what you need.
I'm just working on a project that does this. The method I use is to convert the PDF file to plain text (with pdftotext.exe) and create an index on the resulting text. We do the same with word and other office files, works pretty good!
Searching directly into pdf files from Delphi (without external app) is more difficult I think. If you find anything, please update here as I would also be very interested in that!
One option I have used is to use Microsoft's ifilter technology, this is used by windows desktop search and many other products such as sharepoint and SQL server full-text search.
It supports almost any office/office-like file format, even dwg, msg, pdf, and files in zip/rar archives.
The easiest way to use it is to run FiltDump.exe on any files you have, and index the text output.
To know about the filters installed on your PC, you can use ifilter explorer.
Wikipedia has some links on its ifilters page.
Quick PDF Library's GetPageText function can give you the words from a PDF as well as the page number and the co-ordinates of those words - sometimes useful for highlighting.
PDF is not just a binary representation. Think of it as a tree of objects, where an object node has some metadata and some content information. Some of these objects have string data, some don't. Some of these are even encrypted, and some are compressed. So, there's very little chance your string finder will work on any arbitrary PDF.