In addition to PDF form filling and annotations, Foxit MobilePDF SDK also has support for text-reflow and viewing in night mode, which makes reading PDFs more convenient on mobile devices. Most notably, the SDK also supports JavaScript-based arithmetic calculations, a feature that is quite popular in PDFs with formulas created using Adobe Acrobat but has yet to be widely supported by other mobile PDF libraries.įoxit does not provide direct download links to the SDK on its website, only a trial request form which you have to fill in to contact a sales representative for the links.
The SDK also supports UWP, allowing you to develop PDF-enabled applications for Windows 8 and Windows 10:
This is a screenshot of the Foxit SDK sample Android application: It supports iOS, Android and Universal Windows Platform (UWP). This SDK is made by Foxit, the company that creates Foxit Reader, often used as an alternative to Adobe PDF Reader. There is also no trial version immediately available for download from the website. This causes the final price to be open to interpretation and may vary wildly depending on other seemingly unrelated factors. However what I do not like about this SDK is that the website does not specify a fixed price for the SDK and request users to ask for quotation. Same as Radaee PDF, PDFNet is not free, which is understandable. The SDK API methods also provide ways to extract data from PDF forms as well as editing the PDF files, both on Android (in Java) and iOS (in Objective-C). The SDK also supports for rendering and filling PDF forms. The sample iOS and Android applications of PDFTron, which come with the SDK, support PDF annotations such as highlighting, drawing shapes, writing text and the like: The company also offers a HTML to PDF conversion library and a WebViewer that supports previewing of a wide variety of file formats. NET, Java, C/C++ and Pythons are available too. Made by PDFTron, this is a multi-platform PDF engine that supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Xamarin. With these methods and some knowledge of PDF file format, one should be able to manipulate PDF forms programmatically with no issues. Int Page_getAnnotFieldName(PDF_PAGE page, PDF_ANNOT annot, char *buf, int buf_size) PDF_ANNOT Page_getAnnot(PDF_PAGE page, int index)īool Page_addAnnotInk2(PDF_PAGE page, PDF_INK hand)īool Page_setAnnotEditText(PDF_PAGE page, PDF_ANNOT annot, const char *text) There are quite a few methods to manipulate PDF annotation, and form fields, such as:
The SDK methods for Android and iOS are similiar, C-style and quite easy to use. This is the home screen of the Android demo app: The Radaee PDF sample apps on both Google Play and iTunes demonstrate some of the SDK capabilities. A trial version is available for users to test out the SDK. For most people who just need some improvements over basic PDF features offered by UIWebView, the Standard edition, which supports displaying of PDF annotations and form fields, should suffice.
The standard edition offers PDF viewing functionalities, the professional edition provide annotation capabilities and the premium edition offers PDF form editing features as well as encryption support. It has three different versions, standard, professional and premium and costs as low as $489 for a single application license. The default WebView component only renders web pages and does not support PDF, office or multimedia documents, unlike iOS.įormerly known as PDFViewer SDK, Radaee PDF is a paid PDF rendering/editing engine that supports both Android and iOS, as well as Windows 8/RT and Windows Phone. On earlier versions, you’ll need to use one of the PDF libraries described in the next few sections instead. On Android, PDF creation is only natively supported starting from Android 4.4 (API level 19) via the package while PDF rendering is only supported since API level 21. Any advanced manipulation would require the use of a dedicated PDF SDK. The iOS SDK also comes with some Quartz 2D methods that can do basic parsing of PDF documents (via the CGPDFDocument object) and retrieves basic properties by converting it into NSDictionary objects. It also does not offer search or bookmarking capabilities, and most importantly, does not render PDF form fields or annotations well. The default page navigation (vertical scroll) will become inconvenient if the PDF has too many pages. Displaying PDF in a UIWebView, however, has some issues.