PDF printing from app data

[nobach]

Hi all!

I’m trying to figure out the best way to generate multipage pdf reports with headers and footers from data that I have in my app.

Since I’m a graphically oriented person I wonder if there is a way to do the pdf layout in storyboard or as xib-files? If not what is the best way to do it in code?

I found this tutorial here at RW:
https://videos.raywenderlich.com/courses/27-intermediate-core-graphics/lessons/6

But it seems to me that this is somewhat dated since Apple released new UIKit methods in iOS10, half a year after that RW video tutorial was released:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uigraphicspdfrenderer#topics

Right now I use a hack that I made with PDFKit in iOS11 where I just draw PDFAnnotation text on an empty pdf. But this can’t obviously not be the right solution since I cannot handle wrapping of long texts nor page brakes.

So please can anyone tell me what the best practices are when it comes to print a PDF file from data within an iOS application?

BR /Diez

[shogunkaramazov]

@caroline Can you please help with this when you get a chance? Thank you - much appreciated! :]

[shogunkaramazov]

@nobach Please check out the PDFKit chapter in our iOS 11 by Tutorials book when you get a chance:

https://store.raywenderlich.com/products/ios-11-by-tutorials

I hope it helps. Thank you!

[nobach]

I actually bought that book just because of this problem. It explains well how to show PDF:s with PDFKit in your app but unfortunately it doesn’t tell you anything about how to print (with print I mean generate pdf from app data) them thou…

[shogunkaramazov]

@macandyp Can you please help with this when you get a chance? Thank you - much appreciated! :]

[macandyp]

Hey @nobach,

I’m not entirely sure this is possible. From the documentation, it looks as though it requires that you override draw(with:).

Adding Custom Graphics to a PDF documentation

Edit: just saw your other comment. Sorry it wasn’t totally clear, but you are somewhat generating PDF content in the sample. You can actually generate a PDFPage and PDFDocument with annotations and then save that data, thus generating a brand new PDF. It does require you to handle what your document should look like in code.