Building a document processing app from the ground up is often difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Even the simplest features require a long time to develop, test, and maintain. For businesses, this means higher costs and longer time-to-market, and your competitors may launch before you.
However, the good news is that developers can bring accurate PDF viewing, creation, editing, annotating, and generation to an app with the help of a PDF SDK. The goal is to help developers integrate PDF functionalities into an app without creating them from scratch.
In this write-up, we’ve discussed what a PDF SDK is and how it can help product managers, app developers, CTOs, and business decision-makers manage PDFs efficiently in their businesses. Read on!
What is a PDF SDK?
A PDF SDK (Software Development Kit) is a set of tools and libraries designed to help developers integrate PDF-related functionality into their applications using languages like Java, Python, and C++.
This includes incorporating annotation tools, redaction, encryption, form handling, PDF editing, and text/image extraction into your application. The goal is to shorten the development timeline and positively impact your bottom line and user experience.
What are the Benefits of Embedding a PDF SDK into Your App?
Well, it’s obvious that most businesses and app developers today want to streamline their workflows. Here are the top five business benefits of embedding a PDF SDK into your app.
1. Accelerate Development Time
PDF features are not easy to build. The developer must account for various PDF versions, rendering engines, font embedding, layout quirks, and more. If you build from scratch, this can take up to several months. This will increase development costs, delay product release, and tie the team with non-core work.
PDF SDK will accelerate the development timeline and ensure you go to market faster. Its pre-built tools and libraries help you create complex features faster. You can easily add features such as annotations, forms, signatures, editing, and collaboration to the applications.
So, instead of creating the features from scratch, you customize them to meet your business needs. Ideally, you’d deploy the SDK for non-core features and resources to the core aspects. This means you can launch faster than the competition, which will give you a competitive edge.
2. Improve User Experience (UX)
PDF SDKs enable businesses to streamline workflows and enhance productivity. That’s why your app must be able to handle PDF documents smoothly, especially if you need bulk PDF processing.
No user wants to download files, switch to another app to make changes, save, and return to continue from where they left off. If asked, almost everyone would want to do everything within the app.
PDF SDK allows your developer to customize the user interface to the user’s needs. Users can easily create, edit, view, annotate, sign, comment, and manage PDF documents directly within the app. This increases user engagement, retention, and satisfaction and reduces drop-off rates.
3. Enhance Security and Compliance
Document security is critical if your app handles sensitive or confidential documents like contracts, medical records, ID scans, or legal files. Mishandling these documents can lead to serious consequences, such as data breaches, loss of customer trust, fines from regulatory bodies, and even lawsuits.
A PDF SDK has advanced security features to reduce vulnerabilities and comply with data protection regulations. This includes:
- Document encryption to protect files
- Password protection to restrict unauthorized access
- Digital signatures to verify authenticity and prevent tampering
- Redaction tools for permanent removal of sensitive content
- Audit trails to track who accessed or modified a document
- Role-based access control so users can only see what they are allowed to
4. Lower Maintenance and Support Costs
Apps need continuous improvements to remain relevant. When you build your own PDF functionalities, you must regularly fix bugs, update for new OS versions, optimize for performance, and ensure they are compatible with the latest PDF standards. This cost can add up in the long run.
However, PDF SDKs have regular updates, and new features are added to boost functionality. For instance, you can access cutting-edge tech like machine learning and AI. This means your PDF capabilities will continuously improve without investing in development.
The result? You won’t have to worry about downtime, which is great for user experience and preventing churn.
5. Scalability and Flexibility
Your PDF features must scale as your user base grows and the application evolves. What works for a few hundred users will not meet enterprise-level demand. If you had built your PDF, it would be expensive and harder to scale.
On the contrary, PDF SDK is built with scalability in mind. It can handle high volumes of documents (bulk processing), support multiple platforms, and adapt to your business’s changing needs.
This means you can:
- Scale fast without performance or compatibility issues
- Adapt to new needs or markets with minimal disruptions
Conclusion
Considering whether or not to embed a PDF SDK into your app is a no-brainer. It’s particularly useful if your business handles a large volume of documents or the app needs document processing features.
It reduces the development timeline because you only need to customize the functionality to your business needs and not build the whole thing from scratch. In the end, the cost of development and maintenance will be lower, user experience will improve, and scaling will be easier.
