How can i create a PDF file programmatically in an iphone application ?

Question

Hi, Everybody i have a requirement where the user when press a UIButton it generate a PDF file for that action.

Any Suggestion.

Answer 1

Use a web service on a server back end to post the data to - then generate the PDF and return it to the browser/app with the correct mime type to open as a PDF.

ColdFusion could easily do this for you in just a few lines of code.

Answer 2

See pg 35 of "Drawing with Quartz" to see how to create a PDF Graphics Context.

Some notes:

"iPhoneOSNote: If you want to create a PDF graphics context in an iPhone application, make sure you also read “Drawing to a Graphics Context in iPhone OS” (page 27)."

"You can write any content to a PDF that’s appropriate for your application—images, text, path drawing—and you can add links and encryption. For more information see “PDF Document Creation, Viewing, and Transforming” (page 177)."

Answer 3

As an example of creating a PDF from the contents of a CALayer, you can refer to the -dataForPDFRepresentationOfLayer method within the CPLayer class in the Core Plot framework. You can do something similar to extract the content from a CALayer-backed UIView, although we had to subclass CALayer in order to get vector elements to render to a PDF properly.