PDFTron Blog

Document scanner apps are one of the more popular tools that make smart use of mobile device features, like the built-in camera and touch-screen, to make scanning both convenient and practical for…

Oct 23 2020

React Native is an open source framework for building native mobile apps using JavaScript. Being a popular choice for mobile apps, it compiles the JavaScript components into native components to provide…

Oct 14 2020

In most document management systems, searches only use the title or metadata of documents. But the title and metadata do not always reflect what's inside. As a result, users must open and scan documents…

Jul 27 2020

Express or Express.js is described as a flexible framework for building web apps and APIs, as well as the de facto standard server framework for Node.js. Leveraging Express and Node.js enables devs to add…

Apr 24 2020

As a commercial PDF SDK vendor, we work with many customers who seek to replace outdated manual redaction methods by streamlining redaction within a PDF-based review & approval or virtual data room app…

Feb 12 2020

This year at the Android Dev Summit Google released the first canary of Android Studio 4.0. One of the biggest changes is the built-in support for Jetpack Compose, a declarative UI toolkit for building…

Nov 7 2019

You plan to embed PDF functionality into an application. But before you dive into the project, you must decide: do you go with a more expensive commercial PDF SDK -- or a lower-cost alternative such as an…

Oct 16 2019

Around 2011, a team of Mozilla engineers set out to discover whether a browser-native PDF renderer written on a web platform would allow web technologies to “subsume” PDF. That ambition led to PDF.js. An…

Sept 10 2019

Performing due diligence on commercial software can be demanding in its own right. You’re working under pressure to get the project to market as soon as possible -- but the consequences of a wrong decision…

Aug 30 2019

This is a guide on how to leverage the PDFTron Android SDK to embed a fast and user-friendly form builder into your Android application. Background PDF provides a robust set of interactive form features…

Aug 20 2019

If you view a PDF embedded in a web page, you would likely use the browser’s built-in PDF reader. On Firefox, that’s PDF.js, a popular open-source JavaScript library published by Mozilla in 2011. PDF.js…

Aug 9 2019

PDF “Fast Web View” or Linearization is a way of optimizing PDFs so they can be streamed into a client application in similar fashion to Youtube videos. This helps remote, online documents open almost…

Jun 11 2019

In a separate blog post, we created a real-time document collaboration app using Firebase and PDFTron's Android PDF SDK. This lets many users view the same document at the same time and communicate via…

May 1 2019

In this article we describe how to add text highlight and ink drawing annotations to a PDF using Swift with PDFKit, Apple's built-in PDF SDK introduced in iOS 11. For info on getting started with PDFKit…

Apr 25 2019

In this blog, we'll show you how to add accurate, reliable, and fast support for Microsoft® Office formats to an Angular project using PDFTron’s WebViewer, a [JavaScript PDF Viewer}(/webviewer/). There…

Apr 17 2019

At PDFTron, we’ve worked with many clients who use Salesforce’s full-featured app framework to develop apps accessing the wealth of information stored in Salesforce databases. However, a number of these…

Mar 11 2019

Users want to work quickly wherever they are, even when working remotely. Yet viewing PDFs remotely is not always pleasant. PDFs must often first load fully before they can open, leading to frustrating…

Feb 20 2019

People turn to PDF for its ability to bring a lot of information together onto a single page. A PDF document can store text, vector graphics and fonts, raster images, and much more, and users can…

Feb 12 2019

Before you convert files to PDF/A, your conversion software will require that you pick a PDF/A standard and conformance level. The differences between PDF/A-2b and PDF/A-2a, or PDF/A-1b and PDF/A-3b, for…

Jan 18 2019

The ZUGFeRD standard makes the sharing of payment information between entities large and small a lot simpler. However, building a program to automatically generate ZUGFeRD compliant invoices is a little…

Jan 10 2019

It is possible to convert from PDF to PDF/A in multiple different ways, using many different solutions. If you’re interested in converting a small number of PDF files to PDF/A, look no further than PDFTron…

Dec 11 2018

In this post we'll show you how to display PDFs in Angular 5+ by using the PDF.js-based ng2-pdf-viewer component, and then wrapping it with a custom UI. Here's what it will look like: The viewer includes a…

Nov 26 2018

In order to let users view PDF documents in an Android app, it's common practice to defer this functionality to a third-party app on the user’s device. By doing so, developers won't have to build their own…

Nov 21 2018

It's possible to display Office documents in a Xamarin app without using a server, Microsoft Office license, or other third party software. The PDFTron PDF SDK will convert Office files to PDF directly in…

Nov 2 2018

Adding a seamless Word, Excel, and PowerPoint viewer to iOS apps is made simple with the PDFTron PDF SDK. Office files are converted directly to PDF in the client, and then displayed with a PDF viewer. No…

Oct 29 2018

Xamarin.Forms provides the ability to build fully native Android, iOS and Universal Windows Platforms apps using C#. In this article, you will learn how to display a PDF in a fully featured document viewer…

Oct 23 2018

React components are chunks of isolated code that can easily be shared across your entire UI, and even across multiple projects. This post will go over how to create a PDF viewing component that you can…

Oct 17 2018

PDFTron was pleased to present at the PDF Association's recently held PDF Day conference in Washington, DC, where I presented about Secure Collaboration on Engineering Documents. As PDFs move from the…

Aug 20 2018

Semantic content recognition is the ability to identify components of a document by their “class” – that is if any particular content constitutes a title, subtitle, section, paragraph, word, figure…

Jan 7 2016

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in 2015. Read our Comprehensive Guide to PDF.js Rendeirng for a revamped overview of PDF.js rendering accuracy and possible implications for your project…

Nov 24 2015

PDFTron was pleased to present at the PDF Association‘s recently held PDFDay conference in Washington, DC and New York City. James Borthwick, a member of our development team, presented a talk on…

Mar 16 2015

In a previous post we announced the availability of PDFNet in Nuget, and also discussed how we made PDFNet work with the AnyCPU configuration. Feedback for the AnyCPU setup has been great, but our users…

Dec 1 2014

We have received lots of interest in our new PDF to HTML/EPUB conversion since it was released in PDFNet 6.0. With this interest we have also gotten questions on customizing the output. So today I’ll…

May 25 2014

PDFTron open sources PDFNet language bindings for PHP, Python, and Ruby. We are happy to announce that the source code for the PHP, Python, and Ruby bindings for PDFNet are now open source. This is in…

Feb 28 2014

Starting with PDFNet SDK 6.2.0-BETA for Windows Store apps, it is now possible to get more useful error messages when PDFNet throws exceptions. Due to limitations of the COM API boundary, only System…

Feb 3 2014

Want to create high quality, fixed layout EPUBs from a PDF? Or simply want to show a PDF file in the browser, taking full advantage of the power of HTML and the browser? Or maybe you just want a simple way…

Nov 15 2013

What is PDF/A? PDF/A (as in Archive) is a special variant of PDF that has been designed specifically for long term document preservation. Initially released in 2005 and based on PDF 1.4, the specification…

Sept 5 2013

A common question we receive from our customers is how do I create thumbnails of a PDF document? The best class to use for this is PDFDraw, which rasterizes* PDF pages one at a time, and provides methods…

Jul 20 2013