Gander reads PDFs in the dark now, and redraws them as you zoom in.
Night mode for PDFs
A page stayed white at midnight however the phone was set, which is right for a Word page and wrong for reading a long PDF in bed. From the viewer's menu, paper goes black and text goes white.
Colours keep their hue rather than swapping to the opposite one, so a blue heading comes back blue rather than orange. Photographs are left exactly as they were printed, while the things that only look like images, a scanned page, a figure exported as a picture, a logo on a letterhead, turn over with the text around them, so none of them is left as a white rectangle on a dark page. The one thing it gets wrong is a photograph pale enough to pass for paper itself, which it will turn over.
Nothing is written to the file, and the setting is remembered. Closes #19, asked for by @MaxKash-06.
Sharp however far you zoom in
A page was drawn once at a fixed size, and pinching in magnified that picture rather than drawing a better one, so anything taken past about twice its fitted size went soft. That is why a tube map or a site plan was unreadable at the magnification it actually needs.
The part of the page you are looking at is now drawn again at the zoom you are at, about a third of a second after you stop pinching, however far in you go. Pages are also drawn at the screen's own resolution rather than at twice it, now that they no longer need to hold spare detail for pinching, so each one keeps about a third of the picture it used to. Closes #20.
A document that fits sits in the middle of the screen
A PDF or Word page is about two thirds of a phone screen tall and a slide is under a third, so a one-page document or a short deck stood at the top with a band of empty ground below it. Anything longer than the screen is exactly where it was.
A Word page also fills the width of the screen now. It was drawn at its real paper width, 816 pixels for US Letter against the 980 the viewer lays out at, so a page sat at 83% of the screen with a strip of ground down each side. It is now scaled to fit, the way a PDF page and a slide always have. No line break moves: it is the same page, about a fifth larger.
Install
Gander-1.15.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:
6aa23b771c382fcc6320d25375a7566ecbaf491e9f5c7b9bc15756875acd780a
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.
