Introducing improved Apple Pencil support, support for Swift Package Manager, .xcframeworks, and more

Today we are pleased to announce version 8.1.2 of the PDFTron iOS SDK. This blog post covers 8.1.2 and the 8.1.0/1 releases.

Apple Pencil support has been enhanced by adding the ability to restrict annotating to touches created by the Apple Pencil. Now, a single finger can be used to scroll the document even when an annotation tool is selected, which leads to a very natural annotating / viewing experience. It also ensures there are no accidental annotations created by the user's palm.

The app settings panel includes the ability to choose exactly how the pencil is used.

PDFTron now includes a new Smart Pen tool - a single tool that allows you to highlight text and write without changing tools. If the user begins to annotate over text, it creates a highlight. If the user begins to annotate over non-textual content (such as blank space or an image), the Smart Pen draws ink. We're eager to hear what you think and what other productivity enhancing "smart" behaviour we could add.

With this release we are now distributing the framework as an ".xcframework", which is Apple's new official way of distributing iOS frameworks.

We are also distributing PDFTron for iOS as a Swift Package, accessible via the Swift Package Manager, built right into Xcode. (Note that "Swift Packages" can be used without issue in Obj-C projects.)

You can use this link for integrating with SPM:

If you're new to SPM, you can see our Getting Started guide for how to integrate.

The .xcframework is available in our .dmg download, and via SPM. A future release will include it as a Cocoapod.

Our .xcframework (available in the .dmg and via SPM) includes support for Catalyst and Apple's M1 processor. Check out our Catalyst-optimized sample app MacReader, which is included in the dmg.

Other enhancements in these releases include:

For a complete list, please see our detailed changelogs.

We hope you like these changes and any feedback is greatly appreciated. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions for future updates. As always, we have some great new features coming soon so please stay tuned!