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Adventures in PDF Swift and PDFKit

Adventures in PDF Swift and PDFKit

Working with PDFs in OS X is straightforward using PDFKit.

PDFDocument

It all starts with the PDFDocument class and in order to leverage this you simply import Quartz and get started. Like so:

import Quartz

let url = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource("myPDF", withExtension: "pdf")
let pdf = PDFDocument(URL: url)
pdf.pageCount() // number of pages in document
pdf.string() // entire text of document

As you can see counting the number of pages and accessing the text is straightforward and theres plenty more to explore alongside this, but I want to move quickly along to working with pages.
While you can access a string of the entire document and this is useful for searches, more often youll want to work with PDFPage instances. You access pages by their index:

import Quartz

let url = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource("myPDF", withExtension: "pdf")
let pdf = PDFDocument(URL: url)
let page = pdf.pageAtIndex(10) // returns a PDFPage instance
page.attributedString() // attributed string for the PDFPage instance

You could convert an entire PDF to a single NSAttributedString:

import Quartz

let url = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource("myPDF", withExtension: "pdf")
let pdf = PDFDocument(URL: url)
let docStr = NSMutableAttributedString()
for i in 0..<pdf.pageCount() {
 docStr.appendAttributedString(doc.pageAtIndex(i).attributedString())
}

but this would take a good deal of time for a long PDF and if you are looking to simply display the PDF then PDFView is the class youre looking for.

PDFView

import Quartz

let url = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource("myPDF", withExtension: "pdf")
let pdf = PDFDocument(URL: url)
let view = PDFView(frame: CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: 500, height: 750))
view.setDocument(pdf)

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