Annotation Appearance APIs, Improved MS Office rendering, PDFTron full API 8.0 and More in WebViewer 7.2

We are excited to announce version 7.2 of WebViewer, our pure client-side JavaScript and WebAssembly-powered PDF SDK. This release introduces an API that allows you to define scalable custom appearances for annotations that will be visible in other PDF viewers. We've also greatly improved our MS Office file rendering and updated the version of the PDFTron SDK that WebViewer uses to 8.0, adding many new APIs.

Check out all of the changes here.

PDF annotations can define a custom appearance which overrides how the annotation normally looks. Custom appearances are sometimes used to display an annotation in a custom way that isn't defined in the PDF specification.

WebViewer has been able to view annotations with custom appearances for some time, but now you can also programmatically add your own custom appearances to annotations. Previously it was possible to create custom annotations in WebViewer but they would only be visible inside WebViewer. With these custom appearances they will be visible in other PDF viewers as well when the file is downloaded.

With this version you can add a custom appearance by specifying the page of a WebViewer PDF file for the annotation's appearance. See this guide for more details.

There have been a large number of improvements to our MS Office rendering fidelity in this version. One of the major improvements is full support for right-to-left languages like Arabic and Persian.

WebViewer provides basically all of the same APIs as the main PDFTron SDK through what we call the full API. In WebViewer 7.2 we now have access to all the PDFTron SDK version 8.0 APIs. Some of the new ones include digital signature verification and accessibility tagging. You can read more about the PDFTron SDK 8.0 here.

For all the changes see the WebViewer 7.2 changelog.

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.

We also have many exciting new features planned for the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned…