Create PDF Annotations in iOS

Question

I've been working on a pdf viewer with support for annotations and I need to be able to save new annotations that the user has created. I've seen tons of examples on how to draw text/lines/images, but that's only flattened content, I need to create actual annotation objects

I've found no documentation or examples about it, so if anyone could point me in the right direction I would be extremely grateful

Cheers!

Edit: After several months of work we could release the v1 of this. We ended up using an open source c++ library, and went through a huge pain to make it compile for iOS. The one in charge of that isn't working in the company any more so we can't publish how we managed to do it

Really? [not even a simple SO search?](http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=PDF+annotation+iOS) — CodaFi, Jun 04 '12 at 22:01
as i said, all the posts you can find in SO are about adding plain content to the PDF, not about adding a real annotation object. Haru lets you create new PDF's, not adding just a few annotations to an existent one (it specifically says it does not support EDITING of pdf's) — Ismael, Jun 05 '12 at 13:14
Well I have (found an open source library), and spent quite some time cross-compiling it to make it work in iOS. This part was done by my co-worker, while I just consumed this c++ library. We were planning on releasing the how-to compile for iOS but he isn't working here any more, and nobody else knows how to build it, so we kind of lost that opportunity — Ismael, Sep 10 '12 at 19:06
@Ismael, did you found a solution how we can highlight text in pdf? thanks — Matrosov Oleksandr, May 27 '14 at 12:50

score 19 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

19

Well, there are several paid/free source codes which are available which includes pspdfkit, fastpdfkit etc. Find the links below:

Well maintaining, support, and features but very expensive:

http://pspdfkit.com/

Looks nice, but not maintaining/support:

http://fastpdfkit.com/

https://github.com/vfr/Reader/

Other StackOverflow Threads:

add annotation to pdf

Add an annotation on a pdf

Annotation (notes, comments) using Quartz 2d in ios

Blogs:

http://codecanyon.net/item/html-pdf-viewer-ios-xcode-project/154673

http://www.binpress.com/app/pdftouch-sdk-for-ios/859

For free/open-source app you can check at

http://poppler.freedesktop.org/

edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

Community

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answered Aug 08 '12 at 12:27

Lalith B

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Hi like PDF..can we have library to add annotation on image in ios – V.J Nov 01 '13 at 11:52
yes you could create a pdf from the images and use the pdflib to generate annotations. – Lalith B Nov 04 '13 at 04:30

score 8 · Answer 2 · edited May 10 '17 at 05:12

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Please read the issues before using this framework, this developer is no longer maintaining and it has some serious issues.

I created an open source framework for PDF annotation in IOS in GitHub. It supports both iPhone and iPad. Please check it out here.

edited May 10 '17 at 05:12

Hemang

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answered Feb 26 '15 at 02:42

lazyprogram

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@Lazyprogram, please update the library, it does not run on xcode 7 over the device. – Md Rais Dec 16 '15 at 13:29
@lazyprogram Is it possible to programmatically add in images onto the PDF pages as annotations? – William Dayanayev Dec 22 '16 at 22:04

Create PDF Annotations in iOS

2 Answers2

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