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How come Android doesn't have a built in PDF viewer?

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Wild Bill@midwest.social
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android@lemmy.world
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Forgive me for this stupid question. I just transitioned from iPhone to Pixel (GrapheneOS) and I’m curious why there isn’t a built in PDF viewer like on iPhone? It feels like you have to open things externally pretty often, but I figure there’s a reason for that. I haven’t used Android in many years and I recently developed an interest for the technical aspects of things, so again, do forgive this beginners question.

Cheers y’all!

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electricprism@lemmy.ml
2 points

I long for the day PDF can just be replaced by SVG since its basically just vector anyways.

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mad_asshatter@lemmy.world
8 points

It was a long and expensive battle just to keep “pdf” as “open” (lol) as it already is.

There are a million legacy reasons why Adobe, MS, IBM, Meta, Alphabet, are loathed, but here we are…

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redcalcium@lemmy.institute
4 points

Pdf has a mind-bogging array of features, which make it so entrenched in the corporate world with no viable replacements at the moment. Things like forms where users can fill them out and submit (surprisingly a popular feature), cryptographic signing to prevent tampering, DRM, etc. Heck, I think you can even add JavaScript code to a pdf.

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JASN_DE@lemmy.world
2 points

forms where users can fill them out and submit (surprisingly a popular feature)

How is that surprising?

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m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
1 point

And SVG can be quite readable if the text isn’t converted to path.

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