PDF Generation in Swift: Creating Documents for iOS and macOS

PDF Generation in Swift (iOS/macOS): A Complete Guide

Creating PDF documents is a common task in iOS and macOS applications: from generating reports and invoices to exporting data and creating e-books. In Swift, there are several built-in and third-party tools for this. In this article, we will thoroughly examine the main approaches to PDF generation on Apple platforms, their capabilities, and usage examples.

Built-in Apple Frameworks

The Apple ecosystem provides powerful tools for working with PDFs without third-party dependencies. The main ones are:

• UIGraphicsPDFRenderer (iOS 10+) — a modern API for creating PDFs in UIKit.
• PDFKit — a framework for displaying, editing, and creating PDFs (available on iOS 11+ and macOS 10.13+).
• Core Graphics (Quartz 2D) — a low-level C-based API for drawing and generating PDFs.

1. UIGraphicsPDFRenderer — Simple and Fast Start

This is the most convenient method for iOS. It allows you to create multi-page PDFs by drawing with UIKit (UIView, UIImage, text, etc.).

import UIKit

func generatePDF() -> Data? {    let pageSize = CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: 595.2, height: 841.8) // A4    let renderer = UIGraphicsPDFRenderer(bounds: pageSize)

    let data = renderer.pdfData { context in        context.beginPage()

        // Draw text        let text = "Hello, PDF World!"        let attributes: [NSAttributedString.Key: Any] = [            .font: UIFont.systemFont(ofSize: 24),            .foregroundColor: UIColor.black        ]        text.draw(at: CGPoint(x: 50, y: 100), withAttributes: attributes)

        // Draw image        if let image = UIImage(named: "logo") {            image.draw(in: CGRect(x: 50, y: 200, width: 200, height: 100))        }

        // Second page        context.beginPage()        let text2 = "This is the second page"        text2.draw(at: CGPoint(x: 50, y: 50), withAttributes: attributes)    }

    return data}

// Save to fileif let pdfData = generatePDF() {    let documentsPath = FileManager.default.urls(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask)[0]    let pdfURL = documentsPath.appendingPathComponent("document.pdf")    try? pdfData.write(to: pdfURL)    print("PDF saved: \\(pdfURL)")}

2. PDFKit — For Advanced Document Work

PDFKit provides the PDFDocument and PDFPage classes. It is ideal for creating PDFs from formatted text, tables, and images. It supports working with annotations, bookmarks, and forms.

import PDFKit

func createPDFWithPDFKit() -> PDFDocument {    let document = PDFDocument()

    // Create a page via NSAttributedString    let pageRect = CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: 612, height: 792) // US Letter    let text = NSAttributedString(string: "PDF example with PDFKitSecond line")    let page = PDFPage()

    // Render into the page context    let renderer = UIGraphicsImageRenderer(bounds: pageRect)    let image = renderer.image { ctx in        text.draw(at: CGPoint(x: 72, y: 72))    }

    // Create a page from the image (simplified)    // In a real project, use PDFPage with drawBlock    let finalPage = PDFPage(image: image) ?? PDFPage()    document.insert(finalPage, at: 0)

    return document}

// Saveif let document = createPDFWithPDFKit() as? PDFDocument {    let url = FileManager.default.urls(for: .documentDirectory, in: .userDomainMask)[0].appendingPathComponent("pdfkit_example.pdf")    document.write(to: url)}

Important: PDFKit is only available on iOS 11+/macOS 10.13+. For older versions, use UIGraphicsPDFRenderer.

3. Core Graphics (Quartz 2D) — Maximum Control

If you