iOS cannot select/highlight text in PDF

4
votes

I cannot select/highlight text in my PDF reader (when you press and hold text). I used the following to open/read PDF documents

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#samplecode/ZoomingPDFViewer/Listings/Classes_PDFScrollView_m.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40010281-Classes_PDFScrollView_m-DontLinkElementID_4

1
iospdf

1 Answers

1
votes

Actually, with iOS5, Apple added support for text selection in UIWebView.

Unfortunately, there's no API for this, and their support is rather clunky and slow. And embedding UIWebView's into your app is a rather ugly solution. (and you can hardly control the UI)

You might wanna check out 3rd party iOS frameworks for that feature. https://stackguides.com/questions/3801358/pdf-parsing-library-for-ios

I worked the better part of year to roll my own PDF parser that calculates the glyphs to get text selection. (it's commercial, google for PSPDFKit)