PDFlib Products for Mobile Devices and Embedded Systems

Our products PDFlib, PDFlib+PDI, PDFlib Personalization Server and TET are also available for generating and processing PDF documents on smartphones and tablets with the following operating systems:

iOS for iPhone and iPad

Android

Windows Embedded CE and Windows Embedded Compact

Additionally we offer support for embedded systems based on Linux. Several combinations of Linux versions and CPU architectures are available. Please contact us if you are interested in PDFlib products for embedded Linux or other platforms. 

Based on many years of software porting experience PDFlib products offer the following advantages for deployment on mobile and embedded platforms:

proven functionality for PDF-related programming tasks

small code footprint: as a result of optimizing the code for many application scenarios the code footprint is small enough even for tiny devices

performance: even on low-end CPUs PDF documents can be processed fast

Please contact us at sales@pdflib.com regarding licensing for mobile and embedded systems, and provide your company and customer details and a brief summary of the project for which you would like to employ our products.

Fully functional product evaluation binaries for various mobile devices and embedded systems are available on our download page.

 

PDFlib Mini Edition (ME)

Since some embedded devices must operate under very tight memory conditions a special configuration called Mini Edition of PDFlib, PDFlib+PDI, and PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS) is available for such target platforms. The Mini Editions reduce memory requirements with the following means:

The database of Pantone and HKS spot color names and values, which is integrated into regular builds, is removed from ME builds.

The code for complex script shaping (e.g. Arabic text) and advanced line break in Textflow is excluded from ME builds. This also affects Unicode passwords for AES-256 encryption and decryption.

Regular PDFlib packages contain all of the products PDFlib, PDFlib+PDI and PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS) in a single package; the products are distinguished at runtime via the license key. In contrast, the PDFlib Mini Edition contains only the PDFlib product. Similarly, the PDFlib+PDI Mini Edition does not include PPS.

In a typical scenario the PDFlib Mini Edition reduces the size of the library from ca. 5MB to 2MB.

 

Android

  • Android Devices

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iOS for Apple's Mobile Systems

  • iOS devices

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.

 

 

Windows Embedded CE and Windows Embedded Compact

Windows CE Device

Windows Embedded Compact (formerly Windows Embedded CE) powers devices ranging from consumer electronics to industrial automation and medical devices. Some examples are

GPS devices

handheld terminals

vending kiosks

health monitors

industrial control and measurement equipment

PDFlib for Windows Embedded CE is available as a native library for use with C and C++. PDFlib is available for Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and Windows Embedded Compact 7.0 with ARM and x86 CPU architectures.

Embedded Linux

  • embedded Linux device

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.

Examples:

The uClinux Embedded Linux/Microcontroller project is a port of Linux to systems without a Memory Management Unit (MMU). uClinux drives Web cams, network devices, and many other consumer and developer devices. uClinux even operates in space as it was part of NASA's ENose project in the International Space Station ISS. uClinux supports a variety of CPU architectures. PDFlib for uClinux is built as Mini Edition (ME), see above. It is currently available for the Freescale MCF5329 processor.

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.

 

 

 

Other Operating Systems and CPU Architectures for Embedded Devices

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.