Lorraine
Lorraine

Reputation: 51

Annotating PDFs: where to begin?

I'm taking a beginning mobile development class, and my professor wants me to jump right in and help him with an app of his written in Objective-C, and I have 3 months. I have taken a few other CS classes so far, but no next to nothing about mobile app development.

This app is basically a songbook that holds many PDF files of music scores. The first (of multiple things) that he wants me to add is the ability for a user to annotate the music score with highlighter, pen, and eraser. Since there are many music scores, I would need to have the app save these annotations for each score, and allow editing by the user later if needed (i.e. allow the user to go back and erase stuff and add more annotations to a given score).

I'm in the planning phase and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this. I was thinking of having the annotations occur on a second view layer, and then saving that layer as an image so that it can be overlaid back onto the music notes sheet at any time (for the user to view). My concern is, would the user be able to re-annotate this layer once it has been saved as an image (i.e. erase and add more annotations, then save it again)?

Or what's the best way to go about this? I would really appreciate any advice because I am in over my head!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 399

Answers (1)

CodeChanger
CodeChanger

Reputation: 8341

Well This is very broad question to answer it but let me help you with some links and you will need to go through that like.

It will help you to start your requirements into app.

There are many 3rd party frameworks are there for PDF annotations:

  1. PSPDFKit (Paid)
  2. FastPDFKit
  3. Poppler (OpenSource)

There are some SO Questions links which also helps you for PDF annotation

Some Github Links

Note: LazyPDFKit - (No longer maintained - Use the source code to fix the bugs)

Hope this will helps you in your research.

Upvotes: 1

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