Detailed Feature Breakdown

To see which OS versions are supported by which versions of PSPDFKit, check out this page.

PDF File Format Support

  • PDF 1.0–PDF 1.7 (PDF Revision 1.8, Acrobat 9) and ISO PDF (ISO 32000)
  • Compression filters: JPEG/JPEG2000, JBIG2, CCITT Fax, and Flate/PNG
  • Rasterizing the whole page or subsets thereof
  • Printing using the Android printer framework (available from Android API 19 onward)
  • Full transparency support (transparency groups, soft masks, all supported blend modes)
  • Limited ability to work with corrupt PDF documents (e.g. broken cross references)

Content Extraction

  • Text can be extracted as Unicode.
  • Horizontal text can be selected, unless it’s an image or pure path vector data.

Viewer

Available for: iOS, Android, Web, Windows

  • Fluid PDF Viewing
  • Thumbnails
  • Smart Zoom
  • Outline
  • Bookmarks

Annotations

Available for: iOS, Android, Web, Windows, macOS

  • Annotation toolbar for convenient annotation creation
  • Annotation inspector for annotation editing
  • Note window for adding notes to annotations
  • Common Annotation Types: Link, Highlight, Strikeout, Underline, Squiggly, Free Text, Ink, Square, Circle, Line, Note, Stamp, Caret, Widget, Polygon, Polyline
  • Specialized Annotation Types: Redaction, File, Sound (iOS and Android only)
  • Video Annotation Types: Rich Media, Screen (iOS and Android only — reading, no creation)
  • Unsupported: Popup, Watermark, TrapNet, ThreeDimensional
  • Annotation rotation for Image, Stamp, and Free Text annotations (iOS and Android only)
  • Storing Annotation Signatures (iOS and Android only)
  • Full Model API access

Forms

Available for: iOS, Android, Web, Windows, macOS

  • Support for PDF AcroForms
  • Web Submission Support
  • Keyboard assisting form toolbar for Prev, Next, Clear, Done (iOS and Android only)
  • Full Model API access

Digital Signatures

Available for: iOS, Android, macOS

  • Supported signing algorithms are: RSA, ECDSA
  • Supported hashing algorithms include: MD4, MD5, SHA-2 (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-512-256)
  • Convenient User Inferface for signing (iOS and Android only)
  • Signature Validation
  • Customizing Digital Signature Appearances
  • Biometric Signatures
  • Creating a Custom Signer using your own encryption (iOS only)
  • Contained Digital Signatures workflow
  • Full model API access

Indexed Full-Text Search

Available for: iOS, Android, Windows, macOS

  • SQLite-based search index using FTS5
  • Support for different tokenizer: Porter, Unicode61
  • Prefix and (optional) postfix word matching
  • Full model API access

Document Editor

Available for: iOS, Android, macOS. Coming soon for Web and Windows. Model API available for Windows.

  • Splitting documents
  • Merging documents
  • Adding new pages (choose from various patterns or a blank page)
  • Removing pages
  • Moving/rearranging pages
  • Rotating pages
  • Full Model API access

Replies

Available for: iOS, Android, macOS.

  • See flattened note threads
  • Review states
  • Full model API access

Image Documents

Available for: iOS, Android, macOS. Coming soon for Web and Windows.

  • Support for JPG and PNG
  • Non-destructive editing
  • Open file format
  • Full model API access

Redaction

Available for: iOS, Android, macOS.

  • Flexible content selection for text or free range
  • Inspector for style adjustments
  • Comment and Approve
  • Commit Redaction
  • Full model API access

Comparison

Available for: iOS, Android, macOS. Coming soon for Web and Windows.

  • Colorize paths
  • Combining two or more designs using different blend modes.
  • Full model API access

Instant

Available for: iOS, Android, macOS, Web.

  • Effortless multi-user data synchronization
  • Real-time collaboration
  • Secure authentication using industry-standard JWT
  • Self-hosted

PDF Metadata

  • PDF metadata is exposed as a dictionary.
  • PDF outline/table of contents is exposed as a custom tree.
  • PDF page label data is exposed as strings.
  • PDF actions are exposed.
  • PDF annotations are exposed as regular objects.
  • PDF form elements are exposed as regular objects/trees.

All of these objects can be programmatically created or modified. PSPDFKit can save annotations back into the PDF (if that component is licensed) and fill out forms.

Security

  • Support for Standard PDF security handler (40- and 128-bit RC4)
  • Support for AES-128 and AES-256 (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption
  • Data providers for plugging in custom encryption handlers
  • Default UI for requesting passwords
  • Exposing document permission flags
  • Respecting document permissions (e.g. disable printing or text selection)

For additional security information, see our article on SDK security.

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The PSPDFKit SDK is a framework that allows you to view, annotate, sign, and fill PDF forms on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Web. PSPDFKit Instant adds real-time collaboration features to seamlessly share, edit, and annotate PDF documents.