Harris Osserman

Harris Osserman

I'm the Founder & CEO at Talk Hiring. We're building a realistic mock interviewing tool with instant feedback that's fully automated. I was formerly a Senior Software Engineer at x.ai, an AI meeting scheduling tool, and graduated from Duke with degrees in ECE & CS.

I enjoy watching the dumbest comedies, pushing the limits of what you can air fry, and biking uphill more than downhill. If you want to contact me, my email is harris DOT osserman AT gmail DOT com

I don't, by any means, think that I know what I'm doing when building companies, but I think that I have a lot of experience to share!

Building a PDF in iOS

Storyboards in Xcode are a great way to build PDFs. But it can be challenging to make PDFs with high resolution without knowing the following trick.


Scaling the PDF

By default, the text resolution for a printed PDF generated by a Storyboard will be mediocre. To make the text much crisper, I recommend the following:

  1. Double or quadruple all of the measurements on the design spec.
  2. Build the Storyboard to those specifications
  3. Before rendering the PDF, shrink all of the elements by 2-4 times.

In the following code block, I am halving the measurements of the view. Halving the measurements quadruples the DpI (Dots per Inch). We are doubling the number of dots in each dimension, which results in a fourfold increase in DpI.

    //First PDF Page
    UIGraphicsBeginPDFPage()
    CGContextSaveGState(pdfContext)
    CGContextConcatCTM(pdfContext, CGAffineTransformMakeScale(0.5, 0.5))
    let firstPagePdfStoryboard = UIStoryboard(name: "GameStatsPDFCoverPage", bundle: nil)
    let firstPagePdfVC = firstPagePdfStoryboard.instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier("GameStatsPDFCover")
    firstPagePdfVC.view.layer.shouldRasterize = false
    firstPagePdfVC.view.layer.renderInContext(pdfContext)
    CGContextRestoreGState(pdfContext)

At GameChanger we experienced this problem. We were building a rich PDF for basketball coaches to share with players, fans, and the press. By scaling up and then scaling down all the view elements, we were able to build a very high quality PDF. Here it is:

Published by Harris Osserman on