There are a lot of resources about how to display a PDF in an App's UIView
. What I am working on now is to create a PDF from UIViews
.
For example, I have a UIView
, with subviews like Textviews, UILabels
, UIImages
, so how can I convert a big UIView
as a whole including all its subviews and subsubviews to a PDF?
I have checked Apple's iOS reference. However, it only talks about writing pieces of text/image to a PDF file.
The problem I am facing is that the content I want to write to a file as PDF is a lot. If I write them to the PDF piece by piece, it is going to be huge work to do.
That's why I am looking for a way to write UIViews
to PDFs or even bitmaps.
I have tried the source code I copied from other Q/A within Stack Overflow. But it only gives me a blank PDF with the UIView
bounds size.
-(void)createPDFfromUIView:(UIView*)aView saveToDocumentsWithFileName:(NSString*)aFilename
{
// Creates a mutable data object for updating with binary data, like a byte array
NSMutableData *pdfData = [NSMutableData data];
// Points the pdf converter to the mutable data object and to the UIView to be converted
UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData(pdfData, aView.bounds, nil);
UIGraphicsBeginPDFPage();
// draws rect to the view and thus this is captured by UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData
[aView drawRect:aView.bounds];
// remove PDF rendering context
UIGraphicsEndPDFContext();
// Retrieves the document directories from the iOS device
NSArray* documentDirectories = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask,YES);
NSString* documentDirectory = [documentDirectories objectAtIndex:0];
NSString* documentDirectoryFilename = [documentDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:aFilename];
// instructs the mutable data object to write its context to a file on disk
[pdfData writeToFile:documentDirectoryFilename atomically:YES];
NSLog(@"documentDirectoryFileName: %@",documentDirectoryFilename);
}
Note that the following method creates just a bitmap of the view; it does not create actual typography.
(void)createPDFfromUIView:(UIView*)aView saveToDocumentsWithFileName:(NSString*)aFilename
{
// Creates a mutable data object for updating with binary data, like a byte array
NSMutableData *pdfData = [NSMutableData data];
// Points the pdf converter to the mutable data object and to the UIView to be converted
UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData(pdfData, aView.bounds, nil);
UIGraphicsBeginPDFPage();
CGContextRef pdfContext = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
// draws rect to the view and thus this is captured by UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData
[aView.layer renderInContext:pdfContext];
// remove PDF rendering context
UIGraphicsEndPDFContext();
// Retrieves the document directories from the iOS device
NSArray* documentDirectories = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask,YES);
NSString* documentDirectory = [documentDirectories objectAtIndex:0];
NSString* documentDirectoryFilename = [documentDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:aFilename];
// instructs the mutable data object to write its context to a file on disk
[pdfData writeToFile:documentDirectoryFilename atomically:YES];
NSLog(@"documentDirectoryFileName: %@",documentDirectoryFilename);
}
Also make sure you import: QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h