Open a PDF document on iPhone

Question

is UIWebView the only way to open a pdf document on the iphone? how can i interact with the document? eg: getting the current page number?

Answer 1

It's not the only way. There's a whole toolkit built in which lets you render PDF pages to a UIView. Check out:

• CGPDFDocumentCreateWithURL
• CGPDFDocumentGetNumberOfPages
• CGPDFDocumentGetPage
• CGContextDrawPDFPage

to name a few (core graphics) functions that relate to PDF rendering.

Answer 2

You should read the Apple documentation about Drawing with quartz 2d. There's a section just about handling with PDF documents. If you don't like to show a PDF in a UIWebView, you create your own view. Just subclass UIView and overwrite the method -(void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect for your custom drawing. Create a CGContextRef a draw your PDF directly in that context using the specific function of core graphics. Core Graphics provides a lot of other functions for PDF documents, like Kalle already mentioned.

If you're not really used to core graphics, it's really difficult sometimes and you probably need a lot time to get used to it, so I recommend using UIWebView to display a PDF. It relatively simple.