Gander reads PDFs as text now, not just as pictures of text.
A PDF page was a picture, and nothing else
Nothing to select, nothing to copy, nothing for a screen reader to read out, and nothing for the search box to look through, which is why the search button was hidden for PDFs from 1.9 onwards.
Each page now carries an invisible layer of the words it contains, laid exactly over the picture of them. A PDF selects and copies like any other document, a screen reader can read one aloud, and Find in document searches the whole file rather than the handful of pages currently drawn. On a long document the count climbs while the file is read, rather than the box waiting for the end of it.
Long documents
A pill at the foot of the screen reads "128/357" while you scroll and fades once you stop. Tap it, or pick Go to page from the menu, and you land there rather than travelling through everything in between. There is a scroll thumb you can drag too, in Word documents, spreadsheets, slides, Markdown and text as well as PDFs. Back closes the search bar instead of closing the document.
Everything else
Documents follow your dark mode. The home screen lays itself out for a tablet, opens on what Gander is rather than an empty heading, and carries Gander's own wordmark. An audio file gets a screen of its own instead of the video player. Turning the phone no longer loses your place in a folder, and browsing a granted folder no longer freezes the screen.
Chinese, Japanese and Korean PDFs that name a standard encoding rather than embedding their fonts no longer open with whole paragraphs silently missing. Carrying every table costs 1.6 MB, so this is a larger download than 1.13: 4.7 MB against 3.7 MB.
Install
Gander-1.14.apk runs on every phone. The app ships no native code, so there is no architecture to choose.
Viewing PDFs needs Android System WebView 125 or newer (May 2024). Any phone still receiving WebView updates is well past that.
Verify before installing if you like. Signing certificate SHA-256:
5B:5C:F6:4A:94:23:7C:D5:F0:E0:85:76:00:38:BC:1C:EB:DF:18:DA:BA:5C:B3:EA:CA:7C:15:9F:22:A7:E2:4B
And the APK itself:
2203e8e7fa472b0e3cea0d86a7884442c54d05cc5f1f1df487086c3a82cd1079
Help get Gander onto the Play Store. Publishing from a personal developer account needs 12 testers opted in for 14 days, and Google now checks they actually used the app rather than just installing it. If you can spare two minutes: join gander-testers@googlegroups.com with your Play Store Google account, then use this opt-in link — https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.arjun.gander — and set it as your default PDF viewer for two weeks. Details in the pinned Discussion.