iOS created PDF won't open in Adobe Acrobat

Question

I've got an iOS 6.1.3 App which puts together a bunch of attributed text (and optionally images) into a NSData using UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData. The data is then emailed with MFMailComposeViewController and

[picker addAttachmentData:pdfData mimeType:@"application/pdf" fileName:@"AppData.pdf"];

The PDF is sent and the resulting PDF opens fine in my Mac's "Preview" application. The PDFs will not, however open in Adobe Acrobat. If I drag the generated PDFs to Firefox, they open but with a warning. If drag them to Safari, I get the a warning "File does not begin with '%PDF-'". Looking a the PDF in BBEdit and "show invisibles", I see that there are indeed a large number of non-printing characters at the very start of the file, prior to the %PDF- If I remove those non-printing characters, the PDF does then open fine in Acrobat and Safari -- but the content of the PDF is not displayed, just a blank page.

The PDF creation I'm doing does involve adding encryption, though the problem is there even if no password is actually entered (i.e. the PDF is not actually encrypted). I also tried it without any encryption code (passing nil as the last parameter to UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData) but that made no difference.

Surely there must be a way to produce Adobe Acrobat compatible PDFs and email them from iOS?

First you need to determine in which step the file is damaged. If you save the file before emailing it, for debug purposes, the saved copy is displayed correctly? — Mihai Iancu

Devin Ceartas Devin Ceartas · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-01T17:17:27

Problem Solved.

Was createing an NSMutableData object with NSMutableData dataWithLength: instead of NSMutableData dataWithCapacity:

so I probably had some unused Data space at the beginning. Oops.

iOS created PDF won't open in Adobe Acrobat

1 Answers