PDFXKit

PDFXKit is a drop-in replacement for Apple’s PDFKit using the industry leading PSPDFKit framework under the hood. The latest version requires PSPDFKit 11.3 for iOS and Xcode 13.2.1 or later.

Note: PSPDFKit is a commercial product and requires a paid license for production use.

Introduction

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.

Support, Issues and License Questions

PSPDFKit offers support for customers with an active SDK license via https://pspdfkit.com/support/request/

Are you evaluating our SDK? That’s great, we’re happy to help out! To make sure this is fast, please use a work email and have someone from your company fill out our sales form.

Getting Started

You can freely evaluate PSPDFKit without a license. The framework will display a watermark on the opened PDFs. For production use and licensing please refer to the previous section.

Using Swift Package Manager

Add PDFXKit Swift Package to your project:

• In Xcode 13 or higher, go to File / Add Packages… and enter the following package repository URL into the search field: https://github.com/PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.
• Select “Up to Next Major Version” follow the instructions to finish the setup

Using CocoaPods

We assume you are familiar with CocoaPods, otherwise please consult the documentation first.

First, you’ll have to add PDFXKit as a dependency to your Podfile:

# Replace `YourAppName` with your app’s target name.
target :YourAppName do
  pod 'PDFXKit', :git => "git@github.com:PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.git", :branch => "master"
end

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.

Manual Setup

Note: manual setup is only for experts, we assume you know what you are doing. If you are unsure, please use Swift Package Manager instead.

First, build the PDFXKit framework:

• Clone git@github.com:PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.git
• Open the terminal and cd into the PDFXKit directory
• Run rake compile

You should now have the PDFXFKit.xcframework in the Build folder. Next, add the PSPDFKit.xcframework, PSPDFKitUI.xcframework, and PDFXKit.xcframework 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.

You should now be able to build & run your app.

Switch to PDFXKit

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 with import 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 and PDFThumbnailView to PDFXView and PDFXThumbnailView.

• Open each xib and replace all custom classes set to PDFView and PDFThumbnailView to PDFXView and PDFXThumbnailView

If you are using Swift:

• Build & run your project, it should produce build errors for every use of a PDFKit notification constant, fix those by adding an X to the prefix, i.e. .PDFViewPageChanged should be renamed 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.

Limitations

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.

Run the Example Project

• Clone git@github.com:PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.git
• Open PDFXKit.xcworkspace and wait for the Swift package manager to download the dependencies
• Build & Run PDFXKitExample

Contributing

Please sign our CLA agreement so we can accept your pull requests.

Technical notes

• All PDFXKit source files live in the Sources directory.

• 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 by PDFXDocument.

Known Issues

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.

License

The PDFXKit wrapper is released under a modified version of the BSD license, see LICENSE.md found at the root of this git repo.