Here im hitting my head againt the wall.
My client provided a pdf with buttons(just like buttons,when user tap on button,it will load next page and previous page etc.).
This buttons will work only when we open it in adobe reader.
I tried the QLpreviewview,quickview but it is not working,all what i can do is just to load the pdf in the webview.
Can anyone please help me in how to load an interactive pdf in iOS.
Thanks in advance.
Have a look at PSPDFKit, it is the most advanced framework I've found for PDFs in iOS. They have an impressive list of customers as well.
It is a bit pricy though, but you have the option to get the Source Code too if you need to modify anything. Could be worth it if your client need that kind of performance and other features as well.
(I am not in any way affiliated with PSPDFKit)
The limitations are due to the capabilities (or non-capabilities) of the PDF viewer used.
Currently the leading PDF viewer on iDevices is PDFExpert by Readdle. Adobe Reader for iDevices is weaker, but can deal to some extent with form elements.
For page navigation etc. you might use links instead of button fields (as far as you can live with the capabilities of links, and not use JavaScript). Links are said to be handled properly with many PDF viewers.
You may have to require certain PDF viewers on instructional level, because you don't have control over the viewer used by the actual user. And, as you noticed, many PDF viewers are simply too dumb do deal with active elements.
Another approach would be looking at PDF-to-HTML5 converters, and serve HTML5 from a server.
Related
I was thinking about creating an ePub reader. All the ePub files I have seen so far seemed very simple: just text paragraphs with some big font for the title, and some rectangular illustration images. So, I thought ePub provides only simple ways to describe the text content.
But it seems that an ePub file contains lots HTML and CSS. I opened a sample ePub and it contained text in <p> with the class attribute. Does it mean that it can basically be like a website archive? The author can use any advanced formatting/layout feature that are used when creating an HTML website? If so, I would have to implement a whole web browser to create an ePub reader.
Or, is the HTML allowed in ePub are somehow restricted to only certain HTML tags and attributes, like the HTML that is allowed when writing on an online forum.
PS: I did some research on my own after posting this, and my conclusion is that it is the former. I have tried some famous ePub apps on the Android market, and they all seem to be weird in terms of GUI (meaning, probably non-native),and whilst there does not seem to be a definitive way to know whether an app is native or a web-app, one trick was enabling the layout boundary, and those apps do not have boundaries inside the ePub view itself, meaningly it probably is a web-view.
I searched GitHub for ePub viewers, and they all seem to be using JavaScript or a web-view, including this Android ePub viewer.
So, probably those ePub apps are just parsing the meta data files in the ePub format, and for the rendering of the book itself, they are just delegating that to the web-view and using some sort of JavaScript framework to add a UI on the web-view.
If someone knows better, please correct me.
My understanding of previous ePub specs is that it is a web archive of sorts. A compressed archive consisting of metadata, fonts, images, and content.
It used to be that this content was only in a specially-flavored XHTML format, but it looks like they've also added SVG content documents. I've admittedly lost track of the ePub spec changes (I didn't realize they had merged efforts with the W3C), but hopefully the spec links above can give an idea of what's different between a standard html5 web page and what epub expects.
EDIT: I should also mention that a lot of the readers I worked with back in the day had the bad habit of stripping out formatting and just presenting text (not even text with embedded fonts -- a big no-no for non-English texts). Not sure if this was the reader software being "robust" and acting against ePub formatting that would break their app, or something else.
I want to download hundreds of pdf documents from a site. I have tried tools such as SiteSucker and similar, but it does not work, because there appears to be some "separation" between the files and the page that links to them. I don't know how to describe this in a better way, since I don't know that much about website programming or scraping. Any advice on what this can be and how one can circumvent it?
More specifically, I am trying to download pdfs of UN resolutions, stored on pages like this one: http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/resguide/r53_en.shtml
It appears there is an in-built "search function," on the UN site, which makes dummy scraping, like SiteSucker, not work as intended.
Are there other tools that I can use?
Clicking a link on the page you mentioned redirects to a page composed by two frames (html). The first one is the "header" and the second one loads a page to generate the PDF file and embed it inside. The URL of the PDF file is hard to guess. I don't know of free tool that could scrap this type of page.
Here is an example of the url in the second frame that ends to the PDF file:
http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N99/774/43/PDF/N9977443.pdf?OpenElement
Is it possible to display a pdf from a partial download?
I need only the first page of a pdf for my app. The problem is all the PDF online are 25mb or more in size. Optimizing for the app is not an option :(
The entire PDF will need to be downloaded to display and save it, but I want to show a preview first.
A similar question, but for android:
How to Display first page of PDF before downloading is completed
I do understand downloading of data in iOS, but how can I tell where in the PDF's data the page ends, so I can just display that.
Yes you can do this but the PDF needs to be pre-constructed in a linearized format. This is something that is part of the PDF specfication and is sometimes known as fast-web-view.
Linearized PDF is the same as normal PDF but the objects in the document are ordered in a particular way and with certain extra information which makes it possible to work with partial data.
In particular the objects for the first page are included at the start of the file specifically so that the first page can be displayed quickly.
So I see no reason you shouldn't download the objects at the start of the PDF and use those to display the first page. You could use the hint tables for fast access to selected other pages but that would be quite complicated.
However the essence is that you need to pick up the group-one objects for the first page. These should run from the "%PDF" header through to the first "%%EOF". I'm not sure whether your environment will complain about the missing (but not required) objects but if it does you will need to blank them out on a binary level so that you have an internally consistent page one PDF.
For full details on PDF linearization see the Adobe PDF Specification.
My answers may feature concepts based around ABCpdf .NET. It's what I work on. It's what I know. :-)
Does anyone have any ideas how I could package an external interactive slide that could be dynamically loaded by an iOS app? Is it at all possible?
e.g. Imagine having a presentation app on an iPad. There is a set of interactive slides held on the web somewhere, let's say they contain draggable elements.
Can I load one of these slide objects into the app and interact with it? If so, what format would the slide object be?
Thanks,
Mark
Technically it's possible to dynamically load bundles (NSBundle) components in an app. These bundles could even contain executable code, though AppStore guidelines prohibit use of dynamically loaded NSBundles in this way for security reasons.
Additionally you could just use a UIWebView to display some 'slides' on a webpage, though it will be very hard to make the app behave as if it's the same as the native slides - perhaps even impossible (due to how rendering of webpages work compared to native controls, for example).
Ok so lets say you have these "external interactive slides" on a web server somehow. Since you are not saying they are of a certain type (like powerpoint or such) I will just assume that these slides are of some rare format that is probably not supported by any existing apps or the Safari browser.
Then the answer to your question would be: Write your own iOS-app that can read, present and edit these slides. What format are they? Well it doesn't matter. Write an app that can download the slide data from the data and parse it, and present it on the phone.
Then let the user interact with it, and perhaps make the app upload the changes to the server.
You can do anything you like in your app, there are no limits. You just have to write the code for it. If there was some kind of standardised format, lets say you wanted your app to show powerpoint presentations, then you would have 3 choices. Use someone else´s app, or write your own app with a parser for the powerpoint files or make your own app that use some code that someone else wrote to do it (a third part library that you include in your app)
In your specific case, I can not tell if there are any third part librarys to interact with your slides, but my guess is that you will need to do most of it on your own. You could start with looking at how the web services that interact with the slides online works, and if you can interact with them from an iOS-app that you make yourself.
There is nothing stopping you from creating an app, read the slide data into the app, present it in any way you like, let the user change it, save it in your app, or upload the changes to a server. It's all up to you =)
Good luck!
I'm working on a project where one of the requirements is to import articles from a website. The problem is that different websites have different formats. I could theoretically write some code that strips out extra content from known websites, but this is hardly maintainable. It sounds like there should be something already out there that can "RSS-ify" pages for me into some format, so that I can easily import content.
Is there such a service that I can just "plug" any website into? Also, what are my options here in regards to importing web content into an app, aside from this? How would you handle it?
Edit: Two things that come to mind are FeedBurner and Apple's Safari browser, which adds an "RSS" button. (Safari Mobile actually does one better and renders a neat read view in iOS 5.) Are they relevant to this question in any way?
It seems that there is none. The best I can do is work with content providers to offer RSS feeds and such.