Ionic download pdf

In this article (a four-minute read), you’ll learn how to quickly build a PDF viewer within an Ionic app with www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar, a popular open-source PDF viewer.

Here’s the app we are going to build:

The source code for this project is available in our Git repo.

Prerequisites

Step 1 - Create your Ionic app

Create an Ionic app by visiting the Ionic website and going through the steps to set up your project. It will ask you to choose a template and a framework. We will be using React for this tutorial with the TABS template.

Step 2 - Install the App

After going through all the set up steps, the Ionic website will give you two commands to run:

The first command installs the Ionic command line interface and the next one installs your unique project.

Once your project has been installed you will need to navigate to the project directory to run it locally.

Navigate to http://localhost/ and you’ll see our default tab screen:

Step 3 - Implementing www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar

We will now integrate the open-source www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar library into our project to render a PDF inside our app. We will start by downloading the latest stable release from GitHub and then extracting the contents into a new folder.

We will also need a PDF file to view, which we will place in the web folder. You can use your own or download one from here.

The new file structure in our public folder will look like the following (it’s OK to have a different www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar version number):

Step 4 - Create a React Component

Next, let’s create a basic React component for our PDF viewer called www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar, located under src/components. Here’s the code:

The section of our component is where we will define the type of the props being passed to our component.

is the path to where the www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar is located. You may have to change this path if you didn’t place your download of www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar into the folder.

is what will return our instance of www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar within an iframe. It takes three props: , , and of a PDF you want to display.

Step 5 - Import the PDF Viewer Component

Now we will import the PDF viewer component and render it in our app.

If you are following along with the tab template, the files you will want to edit are all in the folder and are: and . They are all currently identical besides their names/titles.

In each of the replace the following line:

With:

And replace:

With:

This will display the default www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar PDF. If you want to display your own custom PDF, replace the above line with the line below instead. Replace www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar with the name of your PDF located within the folder.

You can repeat this step for each tab that you want to display a PDF on.

Our http://localhost/ will now display a different PDF on each tab rendered inside our www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar viewer.

Step 6 - Customizing the www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Toolbar

As a final and optional step, we will reorganize the toolbar by moving elements around, removing buttons, and changing the icons.

Let’s open and add the following to the section:

Next, we’ll create inside the folder and add the following code:

The www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar primary toolbar is broken down into 3 regions:

The secondary toolbar is accessed via the chevron icon in the right region:

We can move elements from the secondary toolbar into the left, middle, or right regions of the primary toolbar with the function in . For example, uncommenting this line will move the counter-clockwise rotation tool to the left region of the primary toolbar:

If you wanted to move to the middle region instead, you’d replace with , or for the right region. To move a different tool, replace the ID with the element ID you want to move. (See below for a full list of element IDs.)

We can also hide elements like this:

To hide different elements, replace or with the element ID.

NOTE: Hiding the download and print buttons is not a bulletproof way to protect our PDF, because it’s still possible to look at the source code to find the file. It just makes it a bit harder.

We can also customize the icons for various tools by swapping out the file, like this:

In the above example, is the element ID, while is the path to the tool icon.

And that’s it!

Element ID Reference for www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar User Interface Customization

Here’s handy reference with the IDs of the various toolbar icons:

Conclusion

As you can see, rendering a PDF inside an Ionic app isn't difficult using open-source libraries.

Building a PDF Viewer with Ionic is relatively straightforward, but once you want to start annotating, signing, or filling forms, you would have to implement these things yourself. See our www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Build vs Buy and Guide to Evaluating www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar to learn more.

That’s where www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Express comes in. It’s a commercial www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar viewer that wraps a React-based UI around the open-source www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar rendering engine and offers out-of-the-box features like annotations, form filling and e-signatures. It’s fully compatible with many frameworks -- check out the demo, and let us know what you think!

If you need high-fidelity rendering, increased reliability, and faster performance, you could consider PDFTron WebViewer. It’s a JavaScript PDF library that integrates with Ionic/Cordova, and offers hundreds of features, like redaction, editing, page manipulation, real-time document collaboration, digital signatures, and much more. Check out the WebViewer demo.

If you have any questions about implementing www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Express in your project, please contact us and we will be happy to help!