Are there any good SDKs available on iOS that will not only display a PDF, but will show it as it is downloading from a web source? It is perfectly fine to use a paid for library as long as it is commercial-friendly.
To clarify, the SDK must be able to show partial files as they are downloading, whether I provide the stream or otherwise. I would like to avoid CGPDFScannerRef due to how low level it is -- I have tried FastPdfKit as well but it will only show the whole PDF after it has been fully downloaded. Any ideas?
PDF is a structured format that consists of different types of data blocks such as TOC, text, fonts, colors, annotations and information about these blocks is saved at the end of the file. So this makes it impossible for CGPDFDocumentRef to open the pdf without all the data available.
However you can get around this limitation by linearizing the PDF file so that the metadata information will be put at the beginning of the file. I'm not sure but I think you can then use CGDataProviderCreateSequential in combination with CGPDFDocumentRef to parse a partially downloaded PDF file.
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I am using VFR reader to display my pdf's. I need to extract the Table of Contents on a button click and display it in a tableview then it should lead to the respective pages while tapping on each.
Parsing the PDF Table of Contents is actually not extremely hard. You can use a tool like Apple's PDF "Voyeur" to see the structure or something like Adobe Acrobat's Preflight Browser:
You see that the "Outline" is a fairly simple tree that can be parsed using the various CGPDF* functions. The challenge here is to also parse the destination/action type. PDF doesn't make things too easy and doesn't give you a page number, instead usually you will find a linked named destination. This can be resolved by cross-referencing another table, it's best to look this up in the PDF spec. This is of course just one of the options, it can also be that the destination is one of the > 10 action types that rage from GoTo over named actions (e.g. Next Page) to JavaScript (e.g. this.pageNum = x). In the image above you see a classical GoTo action with the longer string being the named reference.
There are also some other special cases, notably for older latex documents and some pages from the PDF 1.1 spec that did things a bit differently, so be careful about implementing all corner-cases of the PDF spec to not get surprises later on.
Outlines sometimes also include URI actions, so at least implement that type as well. And they can also have font styles and color, so you won't ever get bored. Been there, done that in our commercial PSPDFKit PDF SDK for iOS and Android.
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.
I need to individualize documents within an iOS-App. I could provide the origin-documents as DOCX, PDF, PPT etc. The output-format has to be PDF.
My minimun requirement is to fill some text-fields. Nice to have would be to replace an image, too.
I´m quite used to generate PDFs programmatically using UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToFile etc. But in my current case I don´t want to create the whole document programmatically, I just want to replace some content.
Any hints / tipps?
Thank you in advance.
DOCX is a zip - format file so you can process the contents programmatically and the reconstruct the zip file. PPT is a binary format though newer versions of PowerPoint might also construct zip-oriented versions that you can programmatically process. You mentioned though that you need don't want to programmatically process these documents - which I would probably also do only as a last resort.
For your DOCX origin/source documents (or doc,odt,rtf but not ppt/pdf) you could use Docmosis cloud services if your app can have the external dependency. You would upload your DOCX origin documents with placeholders for text-fields or images as a one-off/occasional task. Your iOS app then calls Docmosis sending instructions and data to create the output PDF and either stream it back to the app or email/store it or both.
The upside is it takes all the load and coding away from the iOS application (there is an SDK). The downside is it is an external depdendency. Please note I work for the company the created Docmosis.
Hope that helps.
Why not just load a page in a webView modal that points to a URL of a page you create? The main parts of the page would be static, and then the fields you need to customize would be populated via Javascript or PHP.
For example, we have a contact form in our app that gives you an option to view the details of your completed form after you submit. When the user clicks on the button to view the Contact Confirmation, it loads example.com/confirmation.php in a modal view within the iOS App.
On the confirmation.php page (on the web), I use PHP to pull in $_GET variables from the URL parameters which then populates the page with my static content, and their customized information that they entered into the form.
I understand the basic of Document Interaction Programming and UIDocumentInteractionController and I've got it working in my app. However I'm having trouble with specific details of using custom file types. I can't find this addressed in the Apple docs anywhere.
My app uses it's own file types with unique extensions. The files themselves are just plists (xml), but I want the device to treat the files as only openable in my app. Originally I implemented the Document Interaction stuff to treat them as XML while I got it working, but now I want it to treat them as binary files that it needs to hand off to my app.
At the moment, if you have one of my files in an email attachment, iOS first shows the QuickLook (which just spews all the text content of the xml out) before you can choose to Open In. Similarly if one of my files is opened with Safari, Safari just shows the XML and doesn't give you the option to show it in my app at all.
So how do I get iOS to not treat my files as XML? I've changed the "Conforms to UTI" value and "public.mime-type" value in the info.plist, but it seems to have no effect.
Any tips greatly appreciated.
As far as i understand the UIT concept of Apple you cannot just change the file extension to change a potential UIT of the file. If the file contains XML-Data, other apps as well as internal apps might recognize your content and show it internally as XML.
Try to store your Plists with NSPropertyListSerialization NSPropertyListBinaryFormat_v1_0 (then you readble XML)
When you did that without success, why not trying this:
use zlib to compress the XML plists afterwards to a zipped file.
make a "unique" file extensions (<file>.myappname)
this should "hide" other apps and quick view.
Tell me if one of the ways did work for you.
I am working as a Software developer for Mobile Applications. I am developing an application in which i want to retrieve the contents of the .doc files that arrive on the Blackberry mobile as an Email Attachment Part. Whenever i am retrieving the contents of the .txt files, the code written for the mobile is retrieving the accurate contents but in case of .doc files, it is displaying a lot of junk material in the header and footer of the actual contents.
So, my problem is that how can i get rid of this additional junk material as i want to retrieve only the actual contents of the .doc files. Please reply
Thanks
You can get the specifications of the doc-Format from Microsoft. Though, I don't know if they're complete or even useful. Another guess would be to have a look at Projects which have implemented it, like OpenOffice.org.
Bobby