How to Convert UIView to PDF within iOS?

Question

There are a lot of resources about how to display a PDF in an App's UIView. What I am working on now is to create a PDF from UIViews.

For example, I have a UIView, with subviews like Textviews, UILabels, UIImages, so how can I convert a big UIView as a whole including all its subviews and subsubviews to a PDF?

I have checked Apple's iOS reference. However, it only talks about writing pieces of text/image to a PDF file.

The problem I am facing is that the content I want to write to a file as PDF is a lot. If I write them to the PDF piece by piece, it is going to be huge work to do. That's why I am looking for a way to write UIViews to PDFs or even bitmaps.

I have tried the source code I copied from other Q/A within Stack Overflow. But it only gives me a blank PDF with the UIView bounds size.

-(void)createPDFfromUIView:(UIView*)aView saveToDocumentsWithFileName:(NSString*)aFilename
{
    // Creates a mutable data object for updating with binary data, like a byte array
    NSMutableData *pdfData = [NSMutableData data];

    // Points the pdf converter to the mutable data object and to the UIView to be converted
    UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData(pdfData, aView.bounds, nil);
    UIGraphicsBeginPDFPage();

    // draws rect to the view and thus this is captured by UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData
    [aView drawRect:aView.bounds];

    // remove PDF rendering context
    UIGraphicsEndPDFContext();

    // Retrieves the document directories from the iOS device
    NSArray* documentDirectories = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask,YES);

    NSString* documentDirectory = [documentDirectories objectAtIndex:0];
    NSString* documentDirectoryFilename = [documentDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:aFilename];

    // instructs the mutable data object to write its context to a file on disk
    [pdfData writeToFile:documentDirectoryFilename atomically:YES];
    NSLog(@"documentDirectoryFileName: %@",documentDirectoryFilename);
}

Answer 1

Note that the following method creates just a bitmap of the view; it does not create actual typography.

(void)createPDFfromUIView:(UIView*)aView saveToDocumentsWithFileName:(NSString*)aFilename
{
    // Creates a mutable data object for updating with binary data, like a byte array
    NSMutableData *pdfData = [NSMutableData data];

    // Points the pdf converter to the mutable data object and to the UIView to be converted
    UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData(pdfData, aView.bounds, nil);
    UIGraphicsBeginPDFPage();
    CGContextRef pdfContext = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();


    // draws rect to the view and thus this is captured by UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData

    [aView.layer renderInContext:pdfContext];

    // remove PDF rendering context
    UIGraphicsEndPDFContext();

    // Retrieves the document directories from the iOS device
    NSArray* documentDirectories = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask,YES);

    NSString* documentDirectory = [documentDirectories objectAtIndex:0];
    NSString* documentDirectoryFilename = [documentDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:aFilename];

    // instructs the mutable data object to write its context to a file on disk
    [pdfData writeToFile:documentDirectoryFilename atomically:YES];
    NSLog(@"documentDirectoryFileName: %@",documentDirectoryFilename);
}

Also make sure you import: QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h