This week, we're welcoming back an awesome sponsor to LBOC, it's PSPDFKit! PSPDFKit delivers an intuitive & seamless SDK for integrating PDF functionality into apps on iOS, Android, and the Web.

PDF files have been around a long time. Over that time they evolved to become an incredibly versatile and functional format. They're also wide-ranging in terms of how they're used. Comic books, Apartment leases, flight manuals, etc. All powered by PDFs.

Being able to take advantage of all this great functionality in our apps would be huge for our users.

With it, we can beautifully display PDFs, and allow our users to intuitively annotate documents, and much, much more.

Let's get started.

We'll head over to PSPDFKit's wonderful documentation area and follow the Getting Started steps to integrate the Framework directly, or through a system like CocoaPods.

Once we've got PSPDFKit in our app, we can start playing around.

PSPDFKit provides tons of great APIs for programmtically interacting with PDF files, as well as a bunch of polished, (and incredibly customizable) user interfaces to allow our users to read and manipulate PDF files themselves.

Let's try opening a PDF, and displaying it:

let document = PSPDFDocument(url: documentURL)

let controller = PSPDFViewController(document: document, configuration: PSPDFConfiguration { builder in
    builder.thumbnailBarMode = .scrollable
    builder.scrollDirection = .horizontal
})

We create a new PSPDFDocument, then a new view controller to show it. We use PSPDFKit's awesome PSPDFConfiguration type to neatly build up our settings.

From here we can simply present it like any other view controller. Neat!

PSPDFKit stands out with an awesome, well thought-out API. It's clear that they care deeply about API design, and developer experience.

Before we go, let's try out another couple features. First up, Annotations:

// Create a new PSPDFDocument
let document = PSPDFDocument(url: documentURL)

// Create a link annotation, and set its URL
let linkAnnotation = PSPDFLinkAnnotation(url: URL(string: "https://pspdfkit.com")!)

// Position the annotation in the document
let boundingBox = CGRect(x: 200, y: 400, width: 50, height: 300)
linkAnnotation.boundingBox = boundingBox

// Customize the link annotation's appearance
PSPDFLinkAnnotationView.appearance().borderColor = .blue

// Add the newly created annotation to the document
document.add([linkAnnotation])

Very cool, Next up, Forms. Our users can of course fill out any form fields in documents they open, but we can actually fill them out programmtically too:

let document = PSPDFDocument(url: documentURL)

guard let annotations = document.annotationsForPage(at: 0, type: .widget) else { return }

for annotation in annotations {
    switch annotation {
    case let textFieldFormElement as PSPDFTextFieldFormElement:
        guard let fieldName = textFieldFormElement.fieldName else { return }
        textFieldFormElement.contents = String(format: "Test %@", arguments: [fieldName])

    case let buttonFormElement as PSPDFButtonFormElement:
        buttonFormElement.toggleButtonSelectionStateAndSendNotification(true)
    default:
        break
    }
}

Very cool. We iterated through the form fields and filled them with some example content, and toggled the selected state for any buttons in the form.

We have truly only scratched the surface of what's possible with PSPDFKit here.

PSPDFKit offers a ton of other great features like indexed search, digital signatures, and even document editing! They also provide wonderfully fast and responsive support.

Be sure to check out PSPDFKit's extensive Guides area to find complete documentation and tons of extensive guides.

Thanks to PSPDFKit for their support of LBOC!