What OSes do have native support for viewing PDFs

Question

MacOS X has PDFKit which in turn has PDFView. What other operating systems support viewing PDF files natively?

I don't see how (dis)playing a specific media format is key functionality of an OS such that it needs to be supported natively by the OS core and not by a separate application or library. — Alexey Frunze, Jul 30 '12 at 14:42

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:24

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Android does not have a built-in PDF presenter. However, I found a workaround. Have a look at this thread. I extended the PdfViewerActivity in order to present a PDF file. It works pretty nice.

Snippet:

Intent intent = new Intent(CurrentActivity.this, ExtendedPdfViewerActivity.class);
intent.putExtra(PdfViewerActivity.EXTRA_PDFFILENAME, pathToPdfDocument);
startActivity(intent);

edited May 23 '17 at 10:24

Community

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answered Jul 30 '12 at 14:46

overbet13

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Does it use MuPDF? I mean, is it part of Android (is there the source for it?) or does it use an external library? – Ecir Hana Jul 30 '12 at 14:53
According to their definition: `Native Android PDF Viewer based on MuPDF library` – overbet13 Jul 30 '12 at 14:55
Ok, thanks for the reply, but this is not what I'm looking for. – Ecir Hana Jul 30 '12 at 14:56
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Then what are you exactly looking for? – overbet13 Jul 30 '12 at 14:58
"native support". Not a 3rd party library but a built-in functionality akin to MacOS PDFKit. Is MacOS really the only OS which supports PDF on its own? – Ecir Hana Jul 30 '12 at 15:00
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I told you, on Android there is NO native support for opening PDF documents. I also provided a solution. – overbet13 Jul 30 '12 at 15:05

What OSes do have native support for viewing PDFs

1 Answers1