Android App to host a Product User Manual

Question

I am looking to create an Android Application whose sole purpose will be to display and navigate a user manual that I have in PDF form for a product.

I want the application to offer basic navigation with a "Table of Contents"-like Navigation Drawer, an Action Bar that will display the title of the section currently being displayed, and perhaps a bottom bar with page navigation and a progress bar for that section.

I was thinking I could simply chunk out the PDF into mini section PDF files and then simply display the corresponding chunk on selection in the Navigation Drawer. The primary requirement is that it be fully available and accessible without an internet connection, however, which I believe eliminates WebView as an option. Or perhaps Android offers a way to integrate HTML structured static pages in-app without an internet connection. I merely want to utilize some of the formatting that a PDF or HTML page might offer. I am new to Android development so I don't have a great grasp on all of the features and capabilities.

I am looking for any helpful suggestions that may point me in the right direction.

Answer 1

You can use some of the available libraries for PDF management that are being used now for android.

I used this multiple times. It is based on WebView without connection. Unfortunately it has not a dependency for gradle.

This is a modern view to display pdfs. Really easy to use, but never tried.

Answer 2

although your question is very broad, I have experience with an app exactly like the one you describe. I'm not going to go into every detail but the best solution my team found (an it is a production app today with a decent amount of installs) was to do it in javascript and html5 and then package it with cocoonjs . This because of the PDF manipulation, since there are great libraries for javascript (specially jQuery) that allow you to paginate, separate, and do wahtever you like with pdf files. This way the client (The Magazine producers) only needed to do their magazine in their usual design software which was inDesign, and then export a PDF file whiche they then uploaded to a server we put up for them. Then the application, whenever the user had internet connection could tell him there where new editions and download the PDF to the user's device, and with the functionality put into it with the libraries I told you it looked as if it was a personilized reader made just for the magazine, which upo to some point it was, but it really was a jQuery PDF handler wrapped with cocoon to work both in Android and iOS. Hope I gave you a starting point!