PSPDFKit 8.9 for Android Revamps Advanced Digital Signatures
Amit Nayar
We’re excited to announce the release of PSPDFKit for Android 8.9! This release is focused on adding a shiny new and simplified digital signing API designed to make adding ETSI standard PAdES advanced digital signatures to your documents a breeze. Our improved Measurement Tools offering has had yet another boost with the addition of a secondary unit view option. On top of these great features, we have new Kotlin API documentation, a proper date and time picker using Android’s standard user interface (UI), and much more! Read on for details.
Advanced Signatures
We’ve done away with our confusing and convoluted old digital signature APIs in favor of a much simpler API that allows you to sign documents easily with internationally accepted PAdES level B-B and B-T digital signatures.
PAdES level B-T is an extension of B-B (basic level), which adds a verified cryptographic timestamp token to a signature, proving it was signed on the date the signature was added. This addition to our API is crucial to the integrity of a digital signature and is increasingly important in the age of easily editable PDF documents.
You can see an example of how to use the new API in our Catalog’s Digital Signatures example, and read more detailed information in our digital signatures guide. Our old signing code is still usable, but it’s now deprecated and no longer fully supported. See our migration guide for more information on the deprecations and how to migrate to the new API.
Secondary Units
Following on from our last release, we have yet another improvement to our measurement tools — this time with secondary units! Secondary units allow you to select an output unit different to the originally selected measurement unit. It’s a global on/off switch that, when activated, automatically updates all measurement annotations in a document with an extra measurement value calculated in the new unit. Say goodbye to the age-old imperial-vs-metric debate with your colleagues across the pond!
Date Picker
Our customers were shouting for this, and we delivered in style! No more manually entering numbers, slashes, colons, and semicolons in your PDF date and time form fields! Instead, simply tap a form date or time field, and select your date and time using Android’s built-in date and time pickers! We handle all the formatting for you under the hood, so the resulting string is accurate to the expected format of the document field. Neat! Check it out:
More Improvements and Fixes
PSPDFKit for Android 8.9 also brings with it the usual chunk of bug fixes and improvements. Most notably:
-
Kotlin API documentation — Finally! We now have fully functioning Kotlin API docs. Head over to our Kdoc API section of the website to check out up-to-date Kotlin documentation for all our public APIs.
-
Jetpack Compose 1.5 blocker — We simplified our Maven transitive dependency handling and fixed an issue that prevented customers from using the latest version of Jetpack Compose.
-
Memory improvements — We reduced our memory footprint for documents with complex vector graphics by more than 12 percent!
Amit would rather spend his time making pizza, poking campfires, eating cheese and crisps, or climbing trees, but sadly he has to write great software to help save the world from deforestation. It’s a hard life, but someone’s gotta do it.
