PDF Viewer right in your browser

When a browser viewer helps

Most phones and computers can already open a PDF. A viewer that runs in your web browser helps when that is not so easy, or not so wise:

• There is no PDF app. Some phones open PDFs only through an app you would first have to install. Here you open this page and start reading.
• The computer isn't yours. At the office, at college or at a cyber café, you often can't install anything. A web page needs no install, and the viewer keeps no copy of your file.
• You want to check a file before you send it. Before you upload a scan to an exam, job, bank or visa form, open it here. You can see at a glance that every page is there, the right way up and easy to read.
• You need one thing in a long file. A bill, an insurance policy or a textbook can run to hundreds of pages. Search finds every place a word appears, and the page box takes you to any page at once.
• The document is private. Bank statements, Aadhaar and PAN cards, medical reports and contracts are read on your own device and never uploaded.

The viewer only reads PDFs. It never changes or saves your file, so you can open anything without worrying about spoiling it.

Opening a PDF

Press Open a PDF at the top of this page and pick your file. On a computer you can also drag a PDF from a folder and drop it anywhere on the page. The pages appear in place of the drop box, and you can start reading as soon as the first page is drawn. The other pages are drawn as you scroll to them.

No PDF at hand? Press Try with a sample PDF. Your browser makes a small three-page PDF on the spot, with links, bookmarks and a page of keyboard shortcuts, so you can try every control.

To read a different file, press Open another file in the toolbar, or drop the new PDF on the page. The viewer shows one PDF at a time. If you pick several, it opens the first and tells you so.

Locked PDFs. Some PDFs need a password before they open. Bank statements and salary slips often come this way. When you open one, a password box appears right on this page. Type the password and press Open. If it is wrong, the viewer says so and you can try again. The message or email that came with the file usually explains what the password is. Your password is used only on your device, to unlock the file, and is not kept.

Every control, explained

The toolbar sits above the pages. On a computer, from left to right:

• Side panel (a square with a bar on its left): shows or hides small pictures of the pages and the file's bookmarks. The next part of this guide explains it.
• File name: the name of the PDF you are reading. A long name is cut short with dots.
• Up and down arrows: the previous page and the next page.
• Page box: the page you are on and how many there are, like 7 / 120. Click or tap the number, type another and press Enter to jump there.
• Zoom out and Zoom in (magnifiers with a minus and a plus): make the pages smaller or bigger, in steps from 25% up to 400%.
• Zoom menu: Fit width, where the page fills the width of the viewer, is where every PDF starts. Fit page shows a whole page at once. You can also pick a fixed size from 50% to 300%. At 100%, a page shows at about the size it would be on paper.
• Search (a magnifier): opens the search bar under the toolbar.
• Turn (a round arrow): turns every page a quarter turn to the right. Press it again to keep turning, and four presses bring the pages back. It changes only how you see the pages, never the file.
• Full screen (four corners): the viewer fills the whole screen. Press Esc or the button again to leave. The button only appears where your browser lets a page go full screen.
• Open another file (a page with a plus sign).

On a phone, or in a narrow window, the toolbar has two short rows. The top row has the side panel button, the file name, Search and More (three dots). The second row has the page box and the zoom controls. Turn, Full screen and Open another file are in the More menu.

The pages scroll as one long column, like a web page. Each page keeps its own size and shape, so a wide page in the middle of a report shows wide, and a page saved sideways shows sideways. While a page is being drawn, you see a blank sheet with its page number, and the page fills in a moment later.

Links work as they do in the original file. A link to another part of the PDF, like a line in a table of contents, takes you to that page. A link to a website opens in a new tab, and the website is not told which page you came from.

Page pictures and bookmarks

The side panel helps you find your way around a long file. On a computer with a wide window, it is open when a PDF opens. On a phone it starts closed. Press its button and it slides in over the pages, and it closes again when you pick a page.

It has two tabs:

• Pages shows a small picture of every page, with the page you are reading marked. Click or tap a picture to go to that page. The pictures are made a few at a time, only for the part of the list you are looking at, and only while the main pages are not busy, so reading stays smooth.
• Bookmarks shows the file's own table of contents, if it has one. Many books, reports and manuals have bookmarks for their chapters and sections. Click one to go straight there. A small arrow beside a bookmark opens or folds the sections inside it. If the PDF has no bookmarks, this tab doesn't appear.

Some PDFs ask to be opened with their bookmarks showing. The viewer does what the file asks and shows the Bookmarks tab first.

Searching and copying text

Press the magnifier, or Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) while the viewer is on screen, and type a word or a phrase. The search starts a moment after you stop typing, or at once when you press Enter. It begins at the page you are reading and goes on through the whole file.

• The count, like 3 of 42, tells you which match is showing and how many there are in all. While the search is still running, it shows how many it has found so far.
• Every match on the pages is marked in yellow, and the one you are on in orange.
• Press Enter or the down arrow button for the next match, and Shift+Enter or the up arrow button for the one before. After the last match, it goes round to the first.
• Press Esc or the cross to close the search. The marks go away.

Search is forgiving. Capital letters don't matter. Accents don't matter either, so cafe finds café. A phrase is found even when it breaks across two lines. Letters joined together in print, like the fi in some fonts, are matched as two separate letters.

A word split by a hyphen at the end of a line is not found as one word. If you can't find a word you can see on the page, search for part of it.

How quick is it? In our tests, a search for "trace" in a 14-page research paper found all 416 matches in about half a second. A word in a 117-page maths textbook took 2 to 3.5 seconds. A second search in the same file took about a tenth of a second, because the text of each page is read only once. We checked these counts against another PDF program, and they matched.

Copying text. The text of each page lies, invisible, over the picture of the page, so you can select it. On a computer, drag across the words with the mouse and press Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on a Mac). On a phone, press and hold a word, drag the handles over what you need, and choose Copy. Copied text keeps the words but not the look of the page, so tables come out as plain lines of text.

Scanned PDFs: no text to find

A scanned page is a photo of paper. You can read it, but the PDF holds only the picture, not the letters. There is nothing for search to find and nothing to select. Office scanners, phone scanning apps and photos turned into PDFs all make files like this, unless they also ran text recognition (OCR).

When the viewer finds no text at all, the count says No text, and a note says that the file is most likely a scan. Searching a long scan is slow, because every picture must be opened to look for text. So after 20 pages without any text, the viewer stops and asks first. Press Search every page if you still want it to go on, for example when only the first pages are scans. On our 1,000-page scan, the search stopped in under 2 seconds. Searching all 1,000 pages took 28 to 44 seconds.

To tell whether a PDF is a scan, try to select a line of text. If no words get selected, the page is a picture. Pages that look slightly tilted, grey or speckled are usually scans too.

The viewer doesn't do text recognition. A scan stays a picture: easy to read, but not searchable.

Big files and long documents

The viewer is made for big files. It doesn't load the whole PDF into memory first. Instead, it reads the file from your device in small pieces: only the parts needed for the pages on your screen. Pages you scroll past are put away again, so only a few pages near your screen are kept drawn.

We timed it in Chromium, the open-source browser that Google Chrome is built on, on our test computer. We opened each file six times and jumped to pages far into it. The table shows the quickest and the slowest times.

• 1,000pages in our biggest test file, a 1.11 GB scan
• 0.8 to 1.5 sto show its first page
• 416matches found in half a second in a 14-page paper
• 0 bytessent to any server

The size of the file hardly matters: the 1,000-page scan opened about as quickly as the 42-page one, because the viewer reads only the pages you look at. What matters more is what is on each page. A page that is one big, sharp photo takes longer to draw than a page of text. Phones are usually slower than our test computer, so expect longer times there.

Big scans still need memory to draw, and phones have less of it than computers. On phones and tablets, a page zoomed in a long way is drawn with fewer pixels to save memory, so it can look a little soft. If a huge file makes your browser slow, close other tabs and apps, and read at Fit width rather than a high zoom.

Private by design

Some online PDF viewers work by uploading your file to their server first. The server turns the pages into pictures and sends them back to you. For a while at least, your document then sits on a computer you know nothing about.

This viewer works differently. When you open a PDF, your browser reads the file straight from your device and draws the pages itself, with pdf.js, a free and open-source PDF reader. The file is never sent anywhere.

• The page tells your browser to block it from sending data to any other website, using a security rule called a Content Security Policy.
• The viewer keeps nothing. It doesn't save your file, your searches or the names of the files you opened. Close the tab and the PDF is gone from the page.
• No account and no sign-up.

Once this page has loaded, most PDFs open even with Wi-Fi and mobile data switched off. A few files need an extra part of the PDF reader, such as the fonts for Chinese or Japanese text, or the decoder for some black-and-white scans. These parts come from this website, and your file is never sent with them.

You can check all of this yourself. On a computer, open your browser's developer tools (press F12 in Chrome or Edge), choose the Network tab and open a PDF. You will see the page load its own files, and your PDF never sent. Our privacy policy has the details.

Phones, tablets and computers

• Android

  Open this page in Chrome, Samsung Internet or another up-to-date browser. Tap Open a PDF and pick the file, for example from Downloads.

• iPhone and iPad

  Open this page in Safari or Chrome, tap Open a PDF and pick the file from the Files app. iPhones don't let web pages go full screen, so that button is hidden there.

• Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook

  Use Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari. Drop a PDF on the page, and use the keyboard shortcuts below.

On a phone, the pages use the full width of the screen, and the toolbar takes two short rows, so most of the screen is left for reading. A few tips:

• Turn your phone sideways for bigger text. At Fit width, the pages grow to fill the wider screen.
• Zoom with the buttons for sharp text. You can pinch to zoom too, but pinching enlarges the page as a picture, so small text can look soft. The plus button draws the page again, sharp, at the new size.
• Swipe up and down to read. When a page is zoomed wider than the screen, swipe sideways to see the rest of it.
• Jump with the page box. Tap the page number, type the page you want and press Go on the keyboard.
• Dark mode: when your phone is set to dark mode, the toolbar turns dark to match. The pages keep their own colours, as the PDF was made.

Keyboard shortcuts

On a computer, click once on a page, or press Tab until the pages are selected, then use these keys:

When a page is wider than the window, the left and right arrows scroll sideways instead of turning pages. Ctrl+F opens the viewer's search only while the viewer is on screen. Further down this page, it is your browser's own search again, so you can still search this guide. In a narrow window, Esc also closes the side panel.

Limits

• It only reads. You can't edit text, add notes, highlight, sign or move pages, and the file is never changed.
• Forms can't be filled in. Form fields show as they were saved in the file, but you can't type in them or tick their boxes. An empty box may not show at all.
• No printing. The PDF is already on your device, so open it in your device's PDF app or your browser's own PDF viewer to print it.
• Comments show as they look on the page, but their pop-up notes don't open.
• Attachments and layers. Files attached inside a PDF are not listed, and layers that other programs let you switch on and off show as the file sets them.
• Digital signatures are not checked. A signed PDF shows its pages, but the viewer can't tell you whether the signature is valid.
• Scripts inside a PDF never run. Some PDFs carry small programs, for example to check a form. The viewer ignores them, which is safer, but such a file may behave differently here than in a desktop PDF program.
• One PDF at a time. To read two files side by side, open this page in two tabs.
• No text recognition. Scanned pages can be read, but not searched or copied.

Troubleshooting

• "This file can't be opened." The file is damaged, cut short, or not really a PDF. A PDF that was still downloading, or one saved from an email preview, is often incomplete. Download it again from where you got it. If another PDF program can open it, that program may be repairing the damage as it reads; save a fresh copy from there and open that.
• "Only PDF files work here." The file is something else, like a Word document or a photo. To turn photos into a PDF, use our JPG to PDF converter.
• "That password didn't work." Passwords must match exactly, capital letters included. Check that Caps Lock is off and that there are no extra spaces.
• "This PDF couldn't be opened in this browser." Something went wrong inside the browser. Reload the page and try again, or try another up-to-date browser.
• A page stays blank for a while. Pages that are big photos take longer to draw, more so on an older phone. Give it a moment, zoom out, or close other tabs.
• Text looks blurry. If you pinched to zoom, use the plus button instead, so the page is drawn again at the new size.
• Search finds nothing, or copied text comes out as strange symbols. Either the page is a scan, or the PDF stores its letters in a way that doesn't match what you see. Some PDFs typed with older Hindi fonts are like this. The page still shows correctly, but no viewer can search it properly.
• A font looks different from another program. When a PDF leaves out a font it uses, the viewer draws the text with a similar font. The words are the same, but the look can differ a little.
• Ctrl+F opens the browser's own search. The viewer wasn't on screen. Scroll up to it, click on a page and press Ctrl+F again.

Tips

• Check a scan before you send it. Pick Fit page and step through every page with the next page button. Look for missing, blurry or sideways pages. Turn only changes the view, so a sideways page needs to be fixed in the file itself before you send it.
• Too big to send? If a website or email says the PDF is too large, make it smaller with our free PDF compressor, then open the smaller copy here to check that it is still easy to read.
• Making a PDF from photos? Turn photos of your documents into one PDF with JPG to PDF, then open the result here to check the order of the pages.
• Search for a short, unusual word rather than a long phrase. A name, a number or a rare word finds the right place fastest.
• Use the bookmarks in a long book or report. They take you to a chapter faster than scrolling.
• On a shared computer, delete the PDF from the Downloads folder when you have finished. The viewer keeps nothing, but the file you downloaded stays on that computer.