CGPDF drawPDFPage with rotation support

Question

I'm saving a PDF file with CGPDF under iOS 10. For this I load an existing PDF page, and write it to a new file with a context. While doing so, the rotation information gets lost and the resulting PDF file has all pages re-arragend at 0°.

let writeContext: CGContext = CGContext(finalPDFURL, mediaBox: nil, nil)!

// Loop through all pages
let page: CGPDFPage = ...
var mediaBox = page.getBoxRect(.mediaBox)
writeContext.beginPage(mediaBox: &mediaBox)
writeContext.drawPDFPage(page)
writeContext.endPage()
// Loop finished

writeContext.closePDF()

Then I came up with this code, which handles rotation just fine, but seems to draw the content with a slight offset. Using it with a PDF which has text or anything else close to the margins, results in cut-off content. Tried later also setting x, y, etc. on the pageInfo dict but I guess I misunderstood something here, see 2nd question below.

let page: CGPDFPage = ...

// Set the rotation
var pageDict = [String: Int32]()
pageDict["Rotate"] = CGFloat.init(page.rotationAngle)

writeContext.beginPDFPage(pageDict as CFDictionary?)
writeContext.drawPDFPage(page)
writeContext.endPDFPage()

So my questions,

1) How to use the first approach but with rotation support? Or the second one, but without cropping of content?

2) Where would I find a complete listing of all available pageInfo key-value pairs for this method? https://developer.apple.com/reference/coregraphics/cgcontext/1456578-beginpdfpage

Thanks!

Answer 1

I got feedback from a fellow iOS coder who suggested following principle:

These three steps should allow you to recreate the original page in the destination, while maintaining the page rotation field: (1) set the source page rotation in the destination page via the page dictionary, (2) set that rotation (or possibly the rotation * -1?) in the CGContext you’re drawing into, and finally (3) explicitly set the media box in the destination to be identical to the source (no rotation).

Answer 2

Question is old, but hope following answer will be useful for someone in the future. It will preserve the rotation information of the original PDF page

1. How to use the first approach but with rotation support?

let writeContext: CGContext = CGContext(finalPDFURL, mediaBox: nil, nil)!

// Loop through all pages
let page: CGPDFPage = ...
var mediaBox = page.getBoxRect(.mediaBox)
writeContext.beginPage(mediaBox: &mediaBox)

let m = page.getDrawingTransform(.mediaBox, rect: mediaBox, rotate: 0, preserveAspectRatio: true)

// Following 3 lines makes the rotations so that the page look in the right direction
writeContext.translateBy(x: 0.0, y: mediaBox.size.height)
writeContext.scaleBy(x: 1, y: -1)
writeContext.concatenate(m)

writeContext.drawPDFPage(page)
writeContext.endPage()
// Loop finished

writeContext.closePDF()