How to display PDFs using PDFView

Swift version: 5.1

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

Apple’s PDFKit framework provides a huge range of code to help us work with PDFs, and one of the most useful is PDFView – it renders PDFs to the screen and lets users interact with them.

To try it out, start by importing the PDFKit framework:

import PDFKit

Next, add this code to your viewDidLoad() method to create a PDFView and make it fill all available space:

let pdfView = PDFView()

pdfView.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
view.addSubview(pdfView)

pdfView.leadingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.safeAreaLayoutGuide.leadingAnchor).isActive = true
pdfView.trailingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.safeAreaLayoutGuide.trailingAnchor).isActive = true
pdfView.topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.safeAreaLayoutGuide.topAnchor).isActive = true
pdfView.bottomAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.safeAreaLayoutGuide.bottomAnchor).isActive = true

Finally, create a URL pointing to a PDF you have in your bundle somewhere (or one in your documents directory), then create a PDFDocument object from that and pass it to the PDF view:

guard let path = Bundle.main.url(forResource: "example", withExtension: "pdf") else { return }

if let document = PDFDocument(url: path) {
    pdfView.document = document
}

Done!

Available from iOS 11.0 – learn more in my book Advanced iOS: Volume Two