Creating a PDF Reader in iOS with Swift

How to Create a PDF Reader in iOS Using Swift

In today's digital world, documents such as PDFs are becoming increasingly popular to exchange information. Whether you need to read a contract, a paper, or just look up a reference of some sort, the ability to open and display a PDF document is a must-have skill for any iOS application developer. But with Swift's syntax, it doesn't have to be that hard. In this guide, we'll take a look at how to create a PDF reader in iOS using the language.

Getting Started with Swift and PDFs

The first step in creating a PDF reader in iOS using Swift is downloading the necessary libraries. For this example, we'll be using PDFKit, which is Apple's official library for displaying PDF documents. After downloading the library, you'll want to add it to your Xcode project.

After adding PDFKit to your project, you'll then have to create a view controller that will handle the actual display of the PDF. To do this, you'll want to create a new Swift file called "PDFPreviewController". This class should extend UIViewController and conform to the UIPreviewActionItem protocol.

Now that our view controller is set up, we can begin writing the code for displaying a PDF. To start, we'll need to import the PDFKit framework and declare the view controller as a delegate for the PDFDocument class.

Next, we'll add a method to our view controller that will accept a URL string pointing to a PDF document. This method will create a PDFDocument object, set its delegate to our view controller, and then call the load(from urlString:) method on the document.

Once the PDF document is loaded, we can then display it by adding a PDFView to our view controller. We'll need to set the document property of the PDFView to our PDF document, then call the reloadData() method to ensure the view is properly updated.

Conclusion

Having the ability to read and display PDFs in an iOS app is an incredibly useful skill for any developer. By leveraging the power of Swift and PDFKit, it's now easier than ever to create a PDF reader in iOS. With just a few lines of code, you'll be able to quickly and easily create a powerful PDF reading experience for your users.