Customizing the annotation toolbar in our React Native viewer

The annotation toolbar in PSPDFKit has been designed to be flexible and highly configurable. This article shows how to customize the annotation toolbar.

Presentation

You can show or hide the annotation toolbar using the annotation button in the main toolbar.

Android	iOS

If you want to invoke the annotation toolbar programmatically, you can do so using the enterAnnotationCreationMode() and exitCurrentlyActiveMode() functions of the PSPDFKit view:

// Show the annotation toolbar.
this.pdfRef.current?.enterAnnotationCreationMode();

...

// Hide the annotation toolbar.
this.pdfRef.current?.exitCurrentlyActiveMode();

For more details and sample code, see the HiddenToolbar.tsx example from the Catalog example project.

Customizing the toolbar buttons

You can use the menuItemGrouping prop to customize the annotation tools in the annotation toolbar. The example below shows how to add the free text, markup (highlight and underline), ink, and image annotation tools in the annotation toolbar:

<PSPDFKitView
	document={DOCUMENT}
	menuItemGrouping={[
		'freetext',
		{ key: 'markup', items: ['highlight', 'underline'] },
		'ink',
		'image',
	]}
	ref="pdfView"
	fragmentTag="PDF1"
/>

The customized annotation toolbar will look like this:

Android	iOS

You can see the list of available annotation toolbar tools here:

• Android

• iOS

Using custom buttons

To add a custom button to the annotation toolbar, refer to our video tutorial and blog post about how to bridge native iOS code to React Native.

Annotation preset customization

You can customize the default properties of the annotation tools using the annotationPresets prop. The example below shows how to set default properties for the ink and free text annotation tools:

<PSPDFKitView
	document={exampleDocumentPath}
	annotationPresets={{
		inkPen: {
			defaultThickness: 50,
			minimumThickness: 1,
			maximumThickness: 60,
			defaultColor: '#99cc00',
		},
		line: {
			defaultColor: '#99cc00',
			defaultLineEnd: 'openArrow,openArrow',
			defaultBorderStyle: Annotation.BorderStyle.DASHED_3_3,
		},
		freeText: {
			defaultTextSize: 30,
			defaultColor: '#FF0000',
		},
		measurementDistance: {
			defaultLineEnd: 'circle,circle',
			defaultColor: '#99cc00',
			defaultBorderStyle: 'dashed_1_3',
		},
	}}
	fragmentTag="PDF1"
/>

Available preset configuration options

The table below links to the the configuration options available for each annotation type.

Options available for specific platforms