Draw on a PDF using Swift on macOS

Question

My goal is to write text on a PDF, like an annotation.

I achieved it transforming the PDFPage to a NSImage, I drew on the NSImage then I saved the PDF formed by the imag

Answer 1

You can create a PDF graphics context on macOS and draw a PDFPage into it. Then you can draw more objects into the context using either Core Graphics or AppKit graphics.

Here's a test PDF I created by printing your question:

And here's the result from drawing that page into a PDF context, then drawing more text on top of it:

Here's the code I wrote to transform the first PDF into the second PDF:

import Cocoa
import Quartz

let inUrl: URL = URL(fileURLWithPath: "/Users/mayoff/Desktop/test.pdf")
let outUrl: CFURL = URL(fileURLWithPath: "/Users/mayoff/Desktop/testout.pdf") as CFURL

let doc: PDFDocument = PDFDocument(url: inUrl)!
let page: PDFPage = doc.page(at: 0)!
var mediaBox: CGRect = page.bounds(for: .mediaBox)

let gc = CGContext(outUrl, mediaBox: &mediaBox, nil)!
let nsgc = NSGraphicsContext(cgContext: gc, flipped: false)
NSGraphicsContext.current = nsgc
gc.beginPDFPage(nil); do {
    page.draw(with: .mediaBox, to: gc)

    let style = NSMutableParagraphStyle()
    style.alignment = .center

    let richText = NSAttributedString(string: "Hello, world!", attributes: [
        NSFontAttributeName: NSFont.systemFont(ofSize: 64),
        NSForegroundColorAttributeName: NSColor.red,
        NSParagraphStyleAttributeName: style
        ])

    let richTextBounds = richText.size()
    let point = CGPoint(x: mediaBox.midX - richTextBounds.width / 2, y: mediaBox.midY - richTextBounds.height / 2)
    gc.saveGState(); do {
        gc.translateBy(x: point.x, y: point.y)
        gc.rotate(by: .pi / 5)
        richText.draw(at: .zero)
    }; gc.restoreGState()

}; gc.endPDFPage()
NSGraphicsContext.current = nil
gc.closePDF()