PDFXKit is a drop-in replacement for Apple PDFKit using the industry leading PSPDFKit framework under the hood. The latest version requires PSPDFKit 7 for iOS and Xcode 9.
Note: PSPDFKit is a commercial product and requires a paid license. Please sign up for a free trial to receive an evaluation license if you haven't a production license yet.
Apple's PDFKit provides a great starting point if you need to integrate PDF support into your macOS or iOS app. It is a system library and as such the easiest to integrate.
PSPDFKit on the other hand goes much further offering you a cross-platform drop-in solution with many additional UI components, advanced PDF features, and first class support directly from the developers.
Migrating the full code base to PSPDFKit can be a major undertaking and a deal breaker for many developers. This is where PDFXKit comes in. It is a drop-in replacement giving you the same API as PDFKit while using PSPDFKit under the hood.
For more details, please consult the announcement blog post as well as the Migrating from Apple PDFKit guide.
Make sure you have access to PSPDFKit either as a customer or by signing up for a free trial.
We assume you are familiar with CocoaPods, otherwise
please consult the documentation first. You'll have to add PSPDFKit as well as
PDFXKit as a dependency to your Podfile
.
# Replace `YourAppName` with your app's target name.
target :YourAppName do
use_frameworks!
# Replace `YOUR_COCOAPODS_KEY` with your own.
pod 'PSPDFKit', podspec: 'https://customers.pspdfkit.com/cocoapods/YOUR_COCOAPODS_KEY/latest.podspec'
pod 'PDFXKit', :git => "[email protected]:PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.git", :branch => "master"
end
Note: make sure to replace YourAppName
with your app name and
YOUR_COCOAPODS_KEY
with your own key provided by PSPDFKit GmbH. You can find
your key either in customer portal or by
requesting an evaluation license.
Now run pod install
. Afterwards you should be able to build & run your project
without errors. Next you'll have to adapt your project to use PDFXKit as
described in Section Switch to PDFXKit.
We assume you are familiar with
Carthage, otherwise please consult the
Carthage documentation first. You'll have to add PSPDFKit as well as PDFXKit as
a dependency to your Cartfile
.
PDFXKit requires Xcode 9 and later.
# Replace YOUR_COCOAPODS_KEY with your own
binary "https://customers.pspdfkit.com/carthage/YOUR_COCOAPODS_KEY/PSPDFKit.json"
git "[email protected]:PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.git" "master"
Note: make sure to replace YOUR_COCOAPODS_KEY
with your own key provided
by PSPDFKit GmbH. You can find your key either in customer
portal or by requesting an
evaluation license.
Now follow the regular Carthage setup routine
to add PSPDFKit.framework
, PSPDFKitUI.framework
, and PDFXKit.framework
as a dependency to your
project. Afterwards you should be able to build your project without errors.
Next you'll have to adapt your project to use PDFXKit as described in Section
Switch to PDFXKit.
Note: manual set-up is only for experts, we assume you know what you are doing. If you are unsure, please use CocoaPods or Carthage instead.
First, build the PDFXKit framework:
- Clone
[email protected]:PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.git
- Copy
PSPDFKit.framework
andPSPDFKitUI.framework
intoPDFXKit/Frameworks
- Open the terminal and
cd
into thePDFXKit
directory - Run
rake compile
You should now have the PDFXFKit.framework
in the Build
folder. Next, add
the PSPDFKit.framework
, PSPDFKitUI.framework
, and PDFXKit.framework
to your project:
-
Follow the Getting Started instructions for PSPDFKit.
-
Perform steps (1) and (2) from the above Getting Started guide, Section Integrating the Dynamic Framework, and add PDFXKit to your app similar to how you did it with PSPDFKit above. You may also want to set up your test targets accordingly. Note: make sure to adapt the path for the "Run Script" build phase for PDFXKit.
You should now be able to build & run your app.
First, register the PSPDFKit license for your project as described in Adding the License Key guide.
Now we need to perform a couple of small changes in order to make your project use PDFXKit instead of the system PDFKit.
Update all source files to import PDFXKit
instead of the PDFKit
framework using Xcode's project-wide search & replace:
- Open your project in Xcode
- Bring up the search & replace panel (Menu
Find
->Find and Replace in Project...
) - Search & replace
import PDFKit
withimport PDFXKit
- Search & replace
#import <PDFKit/PDFKit.h>
with#import <PDFXKit/PDFXKit.h>
If you are using storyboards or xibs, update all custom classes:
-
Open each storyboard and replace all custom classes set to
PDFView
andPDFThumbnailView
toPDFXView
andPDFXThumbnailView
. -
Open each xib and replace all custom classes set to
PDFView
andPDFThumbnailView
toPDFXView
andPDFXThumbnailView
If you are using Swift:
- Build & run your project, it should produce build erros for every use of a
PDFKit notification constant, fix those by adding an
X
to the prefix, i.e..PDFViewPageChanged
should be ranamed to.PDFXViewPageChanged
.
Build & run your project, your app is now using PDFXKit with PSPDFKit under the hood.
Now make sure your app works as expected. Specifically, there might be a
conflict with your gesture recognizers. If so, implement the
gestureRecognizer(_:shouldRecognizeSimultaneouslyWith:)
delegate method
for the conflicting gesture recognizer and return true
.
PDFXKit is beta software, many parts aren't implemented yet. Please take a
look at the headers, all unimplemented or only partially implemented symbols are
annotated with the PDFX_NOT_IMPLEMENTED_PRIORITY_...
and
PDFX_PARTIALLY_IMPLEMENTED_PRIORITY_...
macros.
If you want to work on PDFXKit, perform the following steps:
- Clone
[email protected]:PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.git
- Copy
PSPDFKit.framework
andPSPDFKitUI.framework
intoPDFXKit/Frameworks
- Open
PDFXKit.xcodeproj
in Xcode - Build & run
PDFXKitExample
(iOS)
Please sign our CLA agreement so we can accept your pull requests.
Technical notes:
-
All PDFXKit source files live in the
Sources
directory, no nesting. -
Each class has a
...+Swift.h
header for Swift-only stuff which isn't exposed to Objective-C. Example:PDFXDocument+Swift.h
. -
Each class has a
...+PSPDFKit.h
header for public PSPDFKit stuff, i.e. any interfaces that expose access to PSPDFKit when using PDFXKit. Example:PDFXDocument+PSPDFKit.h
. -
Some of the classes have a
...+Private.h
header for internal stuff, i.e. needed by PDFXKit classes internally but shouldn't be exposed publicly. Example:PDFXPage+Private.h
, exposes properties only allowed to be accessible byPDFXDocument
.
Linker warning when building without Carthage. In order to support Carthage out-of-the-box with per-customer PSPDFKit URL, we've added the parent Carthage build folder to the "Framework Search Paths". When building without Carthage, this produces the following warning:
ld: warning: directory not found for option '-F/Users/konstantinbe/Projects/PSPDFKit/PDFXKit/../../../Carthage/Build/iOS'
Conflicting gesture recognizers. Your gesture recognizers might be in
conflict with some of PSPDFKit's recognizers. If so, implement the
gestureRecognizer(_:shouldRecognizeSimultaneouslyWith:)
delegate method
for the conflicting gesture recognizer and return true
.
The PDFXKit wrapper is released under a modified version of the BSD license, see LICENSE.md found at the root of this git repo.