Foxit Updates PDF Software Development Kit for Android and iOS

Foxit Software has launched Foxit PDF Software Development Kit (SDK) 4.1. The updated SDK is targeted to application developers whose applications need to leverage standard-compliant PDF technology and allow users to interact with PDF documents and forms across server, desktop, and mobile platforms.

Developers are challenged to write code for their application front ends that will easily port to these different platforms. In addition, it is important that the user experience is consistent when they move from one device to the other, but at the same time the application must take advantage of the unique benefits each platform provides. The Foxit PDF SDK, which shares the same underlying technology that powers Google’s open-source PDFium project, provides a stable multi-platform PDF technology.

The Foxit PDF SDK is a PDF library for developers who need to develop applications on the Android and iOS platforms. It includes an OOM (out of memory) handling capability to give an application the ability to recover from an OOM condition. For Android, the SDK ships with C/Android Java interface and C APIs. For iOS, the SDK ships with a C interface.

The SDK allows developers to integrate PDF rendering, navigation, creation, searching, annotation, protection, PDF text extraction, image conversion, form data collections, and editing capabilities with their Android and iOS applications. The SDK also contains over 20 demos for each platform to help developers get up to speed quickly.

Users can selectively view and hide the contents in different layers (Optional Content Groups (OCGs)) of a multi-layered PDF document. Multi-layers are widely used in many application domains such as CAD drawings, maps, layered artwork, and multi-language documents.

Annotations enhance the interactivity to share ideas and feedback. The PDF SDK extends annotation support by providing APIs to:

- Get the page index of an FDF annotation.

- Export and import all annotations from or to a PDF or FDF document.

- Get annotations by tab order.

The Foxit PDF SDK also provides other enhancements to make developers more efficient in interacting with PDF documents and forms. Other new capabilities in this release include APIs to:

- Check whether a document is a PDF Portfolio file.

- Export form data to an XML file and import form data from a XML file.

- Check whether a page has transparency.

- Check whether a page object has transparency.

- Get the color space of an image object.