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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 => "[email protected]:PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.git", :branch => "master"
endNow 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.
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
[email protected]:PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.git - Open the terminal and
cdinto thePDFXKitdirectory - 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.
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 PDFKitwithimport 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
PDFViewandPDFThumbnailViewtoPDFXViewandPDFXThumbnailView. -
Open each xib and replace all custom classes set to
PDFViewandPDFThumbnailViewtoPDFXViewandPDFXThumbnailView
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
Xto the prefix, i.e..PDFViewPageChangedshould 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.
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.
- Clone
[email protected]:PSPDFKit/PDFXKit.git - Open
PDFXKit.xcworkspaceand wait for the Swift package manager to download the dependencies - Build & Run
PDFXKitExample
Please sign our CLA agreement so we can accept your pull requests.
-
All PDFXKit source files live in the
Sourcesdirectory. -
Each class has a
...+Swift.hheader for Swift-only stuff which isn’t exposed to Objective-C. Example:PDFXDocument+Swift.h. -
Each class has a
...+PSPDFKit.hheader 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.hheader 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.
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.