Opening a PDF in Flutter

Flutter lets you create mobile apps in Dart. It’s developed by Google, and it allows you to create Android and iOS apps from a single shared codebase. In this post, we’re going to use Flutter to build an app that opens a PDF with the press of a button. First we’ll use an open source Dart package to present the PDF. Then we’ll see how easy it is to integrate PSPDFKit to add even more PDF features to your app.

Below you’ll see the steps for how to open a PDF in Flutter with flutter_full_pdf_viewer. We’ll assume that you already followed the installation instructions to set up the Flutter command-line tools on your machine.

Step 1: Creating a New Flutter App

We can use the flutter command to create a new Flutter app from the command line (we chose the name opening_a_pdf for our app):

flutter create opening_a_pdf

For the rest of the tutorial, we’re going to work in opening_a_pdf:

cd opening_a_pdf

Step 2: Setting Up Dependencies

We’re going to use flutter_full_pdf_viewer, which can be used to display PDFs. We’ll also need path_provider. First add them to your pubspec.yaml:

dependencies:
  flutter_full_pdf_viewer: ^1.0.4
  path_provider: ^0.4.1

We’ll also add a PDF to our assets. To do that, we need to declare an assets folder:

flutter:
  assets:
    - PDFs/

Then we’ll create a PDFs folder next to our pubspec.yaml and put a PDF to test with in it.

Finally, we’ll install the packages from the command line using the following:

flutter packages get

Step 3: Writing the App

Now we can start writing our app. First we’re going to replace the current contents of main.dart with a more stripped-down example displaying a single button:

import 'dart:io';
import 'dart:typed_data';

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:flutter_full_pdf_viewer/full_pdf_viewer_scaffold.dart';
import 'package:path_provider/path_provider.dart';

// Change this to fit the PDF file you are using to test.
const String _documentPath = 'PDFs/Guide-v4.pdf';

void main() => runApp(MyApp());

class MyApp extends StatelessWidget {
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return MaterialApp(
      title: 'Opening a PDF',
      theme: ThemeData(
        primarySwatch: Colors.blue,
      ),
      home: MyHomePage(),
    );
  }
}

class MyHomePage extends StatefulWidget {
  MyHomePage({Key key}) : super(key: key);

  @override
  _MyHomePageState createState() => _MyHomePageState();
}

class _MyHomePageState extends State<MyHomePage> {
  // This moves the PDF file from the assets to a place accessible by our PDF viewer.
  Future<String> prepareTestPdf() async {
    final ByteData bytes =
        await DefaultAssetBundle.of(context).load(_documentPath);
    final Uint8List list = bytes.buffer.asUint8List();

    final tempDir = await getTemporaryDirectory();
    final tempDocumentPath = '${tempDir.path}/$_documentPath';

    final file = await File(tempDocumentPath).create(recursive: true);
    file.writeAsBytesSync(list);
    return tempDocumentPath;
  }

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(
        title: Text("Opening a PDF"),
      ),
      body: Center(
        child: Column(
          mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
          children: <Widget>[
            RaisedButton(
              onPressed: () {},
              child: const Text('Open PDF with full_pdf_viewer'),
            ),
          ],
        ),
      ),
    );
  }
}

Next we’ll add some code to open the PDF using flutter_full_pdf_viewer. First, below _MyHomePageState´, we’ll add theFullPdfViewerScreen` class:

class FullPdfViewerScreen extends StatelessWidget {
  final String pdfPath;

  FullPdfViewerScreen(this.pdfPath);

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return PDFViewerScaffold(
        appBar: AppBar(
          title: Text("Document"),
        ),
        path: pdfPath);
  }
}

This will use the provided PDFViewerScaffold to display the PDF included in the assets. Then we’ll hook up our button to display the FullPdfViewerScreen. Let’s also replace the RaisedButton we have:

RaisedButton(
  onPressed: () => {
        // We need to prepare the test PDF, and then we can display the PDF.
        prepareTestPdf().then((path) {
          Navigator.push(
            context,
            MaterialPageRoute(
                builder: (context) => FullPdfViewerScreen(path)),
          );
        })
      },
  child: const Text('Open PDF with full_pdf_viewer'),
),

Now the onPressed callback will push the FullPdfViewerScreen onto the navigation stack after preparing the test PDF. The image below shows how it looks on Android.

After these steps, we can now tap on a button and scroll through a PDF document. However, we can’t do anything else; there are no annotations. We only have the scrolling view mode.

But this is where PSPDFKit comes in: It includes all of the features you need (and more!) without you having to configure anything.

Opening a PDF with PSPDFKit

First, download a demo version of PSPDFKit. Then follow the integration guides for iOS and Android. You also need to remove flutter_full_pdf_viewer due to dependency conflicts.

Once this is done, we’ll replace the button in _MyHomePageState so it opens the PDF with PSPDFKit instead:

RaisedButton(
  onPressed: () => {
        // We need to prepare the test PDF, and then we can display the PDF.
        prepareTestPdf().then((path) {
          Pspdfkit.present(path);
        })
      },
  child: const Text('Open PDF with PSPDFKit'),
),

For this to work, we also need to add a new import:

import 'package:pspdfkit_flutter/pspdfkit.dart';

Finally, we also need to initialize PSPDFKit by adding the following to _MyHomePageState:

@override
initState() {
  super.initState();
  // Replace.
  Pspdfkit.setLicenseKey("YOUR_LICENSE_KEY_GOES_HERE");
}

And now we can view a PDF document in PSPDFKit! Not only that, but we can also create annotations, look at the document’s outline, fill out forms, and lots of other things. This is how it looks now:

Conclusion

As you saw, adding PDF support to your app using flutter_full_pdf_viewer isn’t difficult, but in doing so, you’re missing out on a lot of functionality. Meanwhile, PSPDFKit ships with many features out of the box, providing your users with a better user experience. PSPDFKit also comes with great customer support, so please reach out to us if you have any questions about our Flutter integration.