ANN: PDFNet Mobile PDF SDK for Android and iOS

September 26, 2011: PDFNet Mobile PDF SDK for Android and iOS

PDFTron Mobile PDF SDK, a feature-rich PDF software development toolkit providing high-quality, fast PDF rendering and more, is now available for Android, iOS and other mobile platforms.

The Android PDF Library ships with simple to use Java APIs (http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/mobile/Javadoc/index.html) that allows developers to seamlessly integrate PDF viewing, creation, searching, annotation, and editing capabilities with their Android apps.

The iOS PDF Library contains a set of Objective C and C/C++ APIs, sample code, comprehensive documentation, and source code (with source code license).

For more information regarding feaures and benefits please see:

http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/mobile/android_pdf_library.html
http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/mobile/ios_pdf_library.html

To request the evalution SDK visit:

http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/mobile/request_trial.html

contact: info at pdftron com

Q:

I wish to follow up and ask what the timing of the next release looks like by now along with a high level set of expected features. This is just to help me with my own release planning.

I would also like to know about printing support. We use the UIPrintInteractionController and pass it a local doc URL right now, bypassing PDFNet.This works but doesn’t print annotations. I know the UIPrintInteractionController also supports a page renderer approach and I’m wondering if this could work in conjunction with PDFDraw similar to the second part of the PDFPrint samples. Do you have any guidance for this?

A:

As part of the next update we are working on a) adding support for retina displays, b) increasing perfromance, and c) and adding a built-in “downloader” that will incrementally display linearized (“fast web view”) PDF’s as each page is acquired. We will also improve performance of the library in terms of memory management and the predictive rendering, and increase the raw rendering speed of the renderer. We plan on making a new release as these improvements are added, likely in the order listed above. I will notify you via email when a new release is made available.

As you have noticed printing a PDF directly using Apple’s API’s relies on Apple’s PDF renderer, so some PDF’s will not print correctly.

For annotation support you could flatten annotation before sending the file (pdftron.PDF.PDFDoc.FlattenAnnots()). To use the PDFNet renderer for printing, you are correct in that you should use PDFDraw to pass the printer bitmaps. This may result in larger print jobs, but the output will be the same as seen on screen. We do not currently have sample code demonstrating this, but plan on adding it soon. If you have any specific questions or problems during implementation, please us me know and we will try to help.

Actually you can draw stuff on top of the control (e.g. your annotations etc), but it (i.e. WPF) works differently than with WinForms.

Basically you would need to add your graphics (e.g. paths, text, images) as children of the control’s root visual. WPF will render the content for you. This is just standard WPF/Xaml so you may want to go through some tutorials on WPF/Xaml development.