The Linux-based Android operating system has become more and more widespread recently with smartphones and tablets. Android drives millions of smartphones from large vendors including Samsung (Galaxy), Motorola (Xoom), Sony Ericsson (X10), HTC (Dream), Acer, Dell and many others. The operating system itself doesn't offer any PDF features, so PDFlib products are very useful on this platform.

Since Android's application development is based on Java, PDFlib products for Android offer a Java programming interface. PDFlib for Android is a JNI wrapper around a native Android library.

Developing PDFlib products requires that the Android SDK is installed and an AVD (Android Virtual Device) is set up correctly. Android SDK r10 or newer is recommended. Android 2.1 and newer is supported.

Apple's iOS operates the mobile devices iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. It is based on Mac OS X. Similar to Mac OS X it offers only basic PDF functionality, so that for simple tasks no third-party PDF viewer or PDF generation tool is needed. Nevertheless PDFlib products can come in handy when advanced tasks are required or generated documents must conform to ISO standards such as PDF/A.

Since application development in iOS is based on Objective C, the PDFlib products offer C and C++ programming interfaces. 

PDFlib for iOS is a framework which offers the PDFlib C language binding for iOS Applications. Requirements are iOS 4.x and Xcode 3.2 or newer.

PDFlib products offer many advantages over the built-in PDF features of iOS which support only very basic PDF generation:

While iOS supports only PDF 1.4 (the version introduced with Acrobat 5), PDFlib products support the latest PDF versions up to the format used by Acrobat X. The difference is that users are missing many graphics and interactive features, and developers cannot take advantage of file format benefits such as improved compression.

PDFlib products support all relevant ISO standards for PDF, including ISO 32000 (the standardized version of PDF 1.7) and the PDF/A archiving standard specified in ISO 19005.

PDFlib products support all flavors of PDF encryption including strong AES-256 encryption, Unicode passwords, and advanced permission settings.

PDFlib products can generate Tagged PDF for improved accessibility and content repurposing.

Embedded Linux operating systems run on a great variety of hardware platforms, and are often used in industrial environments. Embedded Linux is highly popular among vendors of industry and consumer systems of many kinds, ranging from industrial and measuring equipment to communications devices and PBXs.

Embedded Linux versions of PDFlib products can be used with C or C++, other language bindings (e.g. PHP) can be made available upon request.

Example:
The QNAP TS-109 II Turbo NAS system is a network attached storage device based on Linux 2.6.12 running on a Marvell 5182 CPU with 500 MHz. We used Code Sourcery's CodeBench as development environment. This IDE is based on the common Eclipse and GCC toolchains and supports various CPU architectures, e.g. the ARM-based Marvell CPU.

In addition to Embedded versions of Linux a wide variety of other operating systems for embedded systems is available. PDFlib products can be made available for other embedded operating systems (including Real-time Operating Systems, RTOS) such as Wind River's VxWorks, LynxOS, QNX. Due to the proven code portability PDFlib products run on a wide variety of CPU architectures, including x86 family, 68000, MIPS, PowerPC, SH-4, ARM, StrongARM and xScale.

PDFlib products can be deployed even on systems which do not run under control of an operating system or don't offer any permanent storage facilities. For example, all standard I/O operations can be disabled. Input data such as text and images are supplied by the controlling application in memory, and PDFlib creates PDF documents in memory as well. The documents can then be transferred via the network, for example.

In case you are interested in using PDFlib products on a specific mobile or embedded platform please contact us.