How to get a snapshot of UITableView in a PDF format

Question

I have a UITableView which is populated with some data but since it contains data that is more cells than the viewable area of the screen, I only managed to get onl

Answer 1

Here's how you can do it without scrolling the tableview. Simply increase the height of the scrollview to the contentSize. The quality of the PDF is also better if you don't go via a UIImage. This is from my UITableView extension in Swift. The code is stolen from here and there so the comments aren't always mine.

func toPDF(fileName: String) -> String {
    // Don't include scroll indicators in file
    self.showsVerticalScrollIndicator = false

    // Creates a mutable data object for updating with binary data, like a byte array
    let pdfData = NSMutableData()

    // Change the frame size to include all data
    let originalFrame = self.frame
    self.frame = CGRectMake(self.frame.origin.x, self.frame.origin.y, self.contentSize.width, self.contentSize.height)

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

    // Draws rect to the view and thus this is captured by UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToData
    self.layer.renderInContext(pdfContext!)

    // Remove PDF rendering context
    UIGraphicsEndPDFContext()

    // Retrieves the document directories from the iOS device
    let documentDirectories: NSArray = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(.DocumentDirectory, .UserDomainMask, true)

    let documentDirectory = documentDirectories.objectAtIndex(0)
    let documentDirectoryFilename = documentDirectory.stringByAppendingPathComponent(fileName);

    // Instructs the mutable data object to write its context to a file on disk
    pdfData.writeToFile(documentDirectoryFilename, atomically: true)

    // Back to normal size
    self.frame = originalFrame

    // Put back the scroll indicator
    self.showsVerticalScrollIndicator = true

    return documentDirectoryFilename
}