React Native PDF library
Nutrient React Native SDK provides a unified solution for viewing, annotating, and editing PDFs on both Android and iOS. With a single SDK, developers can seamlessly integrate powerful PDF functionality into any React Native application, ensuring a consistent experience across platforms.
Comparing React Native PDF libraries
The following comparison highlights the key features and capabilities of Nutrient React Native SDK and open source React Native PDF libraries. Nutrient React Native SDK is particularly suited for enterprise-level applications that require robust PDF functionality, while open source alternatives are more appropriate for basic PDF viewing and simple use cases.
| Feature | Open source libraries | Nutrient React Native SDK |
|---|---|---|
| PDF viewing and rendering | Basic capabilities | Comprehensive PDF viewing with high-fidelity rendering and customizable user interface (UI) components |
| Annotations and form handling | Limited support through custom components | Advanced features, including annotations, highlighting, commenting, and real-time collaboration |
| Processing and optimization | Basic features | Advanced PDF generation and manipulation capabilities, including merging and splitting PDFs |
| Digital signatures | No native support | Complete support for electronic signatures and form processing |
| Security and encryption | N/A | Enterprise-grade security and encryption features |
| Cross-platform compatibility | N/A | Cross-platform compatibility ensuring consistent behavior across iOS and Android |
Key capabilities
AI-powered document understanding
Instantly complete tasks, analyze text, and redact key information across your documents
Comprehensive PDF annotations
Create, edit, and remove PDF annotations in your applications programmatically or through the UI
Advanced form handling
Create, fill, and customize interactive forms programmatically or through the UI
Text search and redaction
Search text in documents, or remove sensitive information securely
Measurement tools
Measure area and distance, and calibrate scale in PDFs
PDF generation and editing
Generate PDFs from templates; move, reorder, and rotate pages; and merge/split PDFs
Customizable UI
Configure behavior, appearance, and tooltips, and hide specific annotation types
High-fidelity rendering
Uses a reliable PDFium-based engine for accurate document, image, annotation, and form display
Getting started
The Nutrient React Native dependency is installed from the GitHub repository and not the npm registry. To install the dependency, execute the command — yarn add react-native-pspdfkit@github:PSPDFKit/react-native — in your project directory. If you’re using npm, execute the command — npm install github:PSPDFKit/react-native. For detailed step-by-step instructions, refer to the getting started on React Native guide.
How-to guides
Learn how to open a PDF, save a PDF, and customize the UI in your React Native app.
Discover PDF capabilities
Explore allViewer
How to configure the document viewer
Annotations
How to import, export, create, edit, and flatten annotations, and more
Forms
How to fill form fields, extract data, flatten, and more
Instant synchronization
How to sync annotations across multiple users, devices, or sessions
Signatures
How to add electronic and digital signatures to PDF documents
PDF generation
How to generate PDFs from a template, HTML, images, and more
Measurements
How to measure area, distance, and perimeter in PDF documents
Events and notifications
How to listen to events that are dispatched when interacting with the UI
Programmatically create annotations
Nutrient React Native SDK offers APIs to manipulate (get, add, and remove) annotations programmatically. To add an ink annotation programmatically, create an InkAnnotation object and use the addAnnotations API. For more information, refer to the programmatically create annotations in React Native guide.
Programmatically fill PDF form fields
Nutrient React Native SDK enables you to fill form fields programmatically. Each form field has a fully qualified name used to identify and retrieve a specific form field object before filling it. The following example shows how to fill the value of a form field with a fully qualified name (formFieldName) and two radio buttons with fully qualified names (radioFieldName_0 and radioFieldName_1). For more information, refer to the fill PDF form fields programmatically in React Native guide.
Programmatically add a signature
Nutrient React Native SDK enables you to seamlessly integrate electronic signatures into PDF documents within your React Native app. For example, to create an ink signature in iOS, use the following code snippet. For more information, refer to the sign PDFs in React Native guide.
Customizing PDF viewer
Nutrient React Native SDK offers a few ways to show or hide the UI. For example, the UI view mode can be changed using the userInterfaceViewMode configuration option. The following code snippet shows how to use the automatic view mode. For more information, refer to the guides for customizing the UI.
PDF collaboration
Nutrient Instant is our prebuilt solution for synchronizing annotations across multiple concurrent users, devices, or sessions. It offers developers a self-hosted solution that handles document viewing on any platform, data management, conflict resolution, version tracking, diffing, and merging. It’s a licensable component that’s included as part of Document Engine, which can be used together with Nutrient React Native SDK. For more information, refer to the guides for Instant synchronization.
FAQ
Below are a few frequently asked questions about Nutrient React Native SDK.