The PDF viewer in Files by Google is about to get much more powerful (APK t

[phillynews215]

• Files by Google is preparing some upgrades to its internal PDF viewer.
• Right now, the app’s PDF support is bare-bones, with external apps like Drive doing the heavy lifting.
• These upgrades will likely be exclusive to Android 15.

Despite all their complexity and faults, PDFs are still something of a modern miracle, letting us share digital documents as easy as we’d hand someone a paper. But the tools we use to access them are not created equally, and even though PDF files may be practically universal, reader and editor apps vary wildly in their feature sets. Right now we’re looking at what Google’s been up to that could bring some extra functionality to the PDF viewer built into the Files by Google app.

Files by Google probably isn’t the app you immediately think of when needing to work with PDF documents on Android. But in a pinch, the file manager makes it easy to pull up any PDF you’ve downloaded for a quick look. On most of our phones, though, there’s a bit of a trick going on here, and if you’ve also got Drive installed, Files will tap it on the shoulder for a little assistance with displaying PDFs. By leaning on Drive’s PDF viewer, Files by Google is able to offer features like zooming, text selection, and even search.




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