How to build a .NET MAUI PDF viewer with the Nutrient SDK

In this post, you’ll learn how to build a cross-platform PDF viewer in a .NET MAUI app using Nutrient MAUI SDK — a native SDK that exposes a PDFView control you can drop straight into your XAML.

.NET MAUI(opens in a new tab) stands for .NET Multi-platform App UI. It’s Microsoft’s framework for building native cross-platform mobile and desktop applications from a single codebase using .NET.

Architecture and features

.NET MAUI is the successor to Microsoft’s Xamarin project, which reached end of life in May 2024. It was architected from the ground up to offer:

• Unification of projects — A single multitargeted setup out of the box.
• Truly native applications — They run on the native infrastructure of each supported platform.
• Optimized compilation — .NET for iOS does ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation to produce ARM binaries for the App Store, while .NET for Android uses a mix of just-in-time (JIT) and AOT compilation on the device.
• A single codebase that targets Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.

It also ships with MVVM and XAML support, a set of layouts, and a large library of cross-platform views and controls.

Requirements

To follow along, you’ll need:

• For Windows — Visual Studio 2022 17.3 or greater, with the .NET Multi-platform App UI development workload installed.
• For Mac — Visual Studio Code with the .NET MAUI prerequisites installed.

Nutrient MAUI SDK supports four platforms from a single codebase: Android, iOS, macOS (through Mac Catalyst), and Windows.

Creating a new MAUI project

If you already have a MAUI project, skip ahead to adding the Nutrient dependency. Otherwise, create one.

In Visual Studio, choose Create a new project, select .NET MAUI App, and then set the project name and target framework.

From the command line, run:

dotnet new maui -n "Nutrient Demo"
cd "Nutrient Demo"

Adding the Nutrient dependency

1. Open your project file and change the first line from <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk"> to <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Razor">. Then save.

2. Add the Nutrient.MAUI.SDK NuGet package(opens in a new tab) — either through the NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio or from the command line:

   dotnet add package Nutrient.MAUI.SDK

3. Open MauiProgram.cs and call RegisterPSPDFKitSdk() on the builder:

   public static MauiApp CreateMauiApp()
   {
      var builder = MauiApp.CreateBuilder();
      builder
         .UseMauiApp<App>()
         .RegisterPSPDFKitSdk()
         .ConfigureFonts(fonts =>
         {
            fonts.AddFont("OpenSans-Regular.ttf", "OpenSansRegular");
            fonts.AddFont("OpenSans-Semibold.ttf", "OpenSansSemibold");
         });
   
   #if DEBUG
      builder.Logging.AddDebug();
   #endif
   
      return builder.Build();
   }

Displaying a PDF

1. In the Resources/Raw folder, create an Assets folder and add a PDF file named demo.pdf.

   The folder has to be named Assets. PDFs in this folder can be loaded with the LoadDocumentFromAssetsAsync API.

2. Open MainPage.xaml, remove the existing content of ContentPage, and add the PDFView control along with its namespace:

   <ContentPage xmlns:pspdfkit="clr-namespace:PSPDFKit.Sdk;assembly=Sdk">
      <pspdfkit:PDFView x:Name="PDFView" Initialized="OnPDFViewInitialized" />
   </ContentPage>

3. If you’ve purchased a license and assigned it to a bundle ID, set it per platform. Omitting the License property initializes PDFView in trial mode:

   <pspdfkit:PDFView x:Name="PDFView"
               License="{OnPlatform
                  Android={StaticResource AndroidLicenseKey},
                  iOS={StaticResource iOSLicenseKey},
                  MacCatalyst={StaticResource MacCatalystLicenseKey},
                  WinUI={StaticResource WindowsLicenseKey}}" />

4. In MainPage.xaml.cs, handle the Initialized event and load demo.pdf:

   private async void OnPDFViewInitialized(object sender, EventArgs e)
   {
      try
      {
         var configuration = PDFView.Controller.CreateViewerConfiguration();
         await PDFView.Controller.LoadDocumentFromAssetsAsync("demo.pdf", configuration);
      }
      catch (Exception ex)
      {
         // Handle exception.
      }
   }

   Wait for the PDFView to finish initializing before using PDFView.Controller. Loading a document earlier will fail.

Running on each platform

With the document wired up, build and run the same project on any supported platform.

In Visual Studio, choose the platform in the Debug toolbar and select Build > Build Solution. Then start the app. From the command line, target each framework directly:

dotnet build -t:Run -f net10.0-android              # Android
dotnet build -t:Run -f net10.0-ios                  # iOS
dotnet build -t:Run -f net10.0-maccatalyst          # macOS
dotnet build -t:Run -f net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0  # Windows

You’ll see demo.pdf rendered in the Nutrient UI on each target.

Open source options vs. Nutrient

For generating PDFs in .NET, open source libraries like QuestPDF and PDFsharp work well — they create documents programmatically from code. What they don’t provide is a way to display, annotate, or let users interact with PDFs inside a MAUI app, and .NET MAUI has no built-in PDF viewer of its own.

That’s the gap the native Nutrient MAUI SDK fills: a XAML PDFView control with viewing, annotation, form filling, and signing across Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. Use an open source generator if you only need to produce PDFs on the server or in code; reach for Nutrient when your app needs to render and edit them.

Conclusion

With .NET MAUI and the native Nutrient MAUI SDK, you can add PDF viewing, annotation, and editing to a single codebase that runs on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. For a complete sample, see the Nutrient MAUI example project on GitHub(opens in a new tab).

To go further, follow the getting started guide and explore annotations and UI customization.

Links

Here are some additional links worth checking out:

• .NET MAUI on GitHub(opens in a new tab)
• .NET MAUI Community Toolkit(opens in a new tab)
• Build mobile and desktop apps with .NET MAUI(opens in a new tab)
• Learn .NET MAUI — full course for beginners(opens in a new tab)

FAQ