10.3: PDF Annotations

For several years now forScore has had the ability to display embedded PDF annotations. These additional pieces of information are stored within PDF files, but they’re generally added later—after the file has already been created. Some are pixel-perfect, like images, and others are more symbolic: it’s up to each app to decide how to reproduce them faithfully on your screen.

Our presentation of these annotations has always accommodated page adjustments like margin reduction and cropping, but with forScore ten’s ability to skew pages these annotations were left out due to the complexity of rotating and repositioning them accurately. With forScore 10.3 we made the necessary layout changes to allow these kinds of annotations to be appropriately placed even atop skewed pages, so now you can adjust your pages without sacrificing anything.

For users running iOS 9 or 10, that’s pretty much the end of the story. With iOS 11 and the introduction of PDFKit, however, our support for these annotations was largely made redundant—now we simply let iOS do all of that work for us, providing you with broader support for annotation types and renditions that are more in line with the rest of Apple’s ecosystem.

We never know what Apple is planning and it’s always a risk to develop new features or to build out support for something only to have them come along with something better, but that’s the cost of progress. In the end, our customers get better results and we have less code to maintain. That’s obsolescence we can live with.