Reading PDF's : Google's Solution

You may wonder, from time to time, what are these "PDF" files that my computer can't read? PDF files are files that are produced as a portable file that can be read by any capable PDF reader. The PDF File Format was created by Adobe Systems in 1993 and continues to distribute something called the Adobe Reader which reads and displays these files in a clear and precise manner.


Until last year, the only mainstream product that was distributed that was able to read PDF files internally was the Adobe Reader. Google announced on June 17th that they were going to include a PDF reader, replacing the Adobe plug-in,  that would render PDF's as html files. Many other PDF readers had previously fallen short of expectations while, even though it lacks luxury features like bookmarking and pagination, Chrome's PDF reader is very substantially approved.

Chrome's PDF reader can read files placed online along with files that are downloaded to your file system.

Setting Chrome as your Default PDF reader:

The first thing you'll want to do is to search for a PDF file on your computer. Then you right click the PDF file and mouseover (place your mouse over) "Open with..." and from the popout menu click "Choose Default Program"

From this you will get a dialog box asking you which program you want to open it with. You will copy paste this link into the "Browse" text box replacing USERNAME with, you guessed it, your computer account's username

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe 

This will open the PDF file in Google Chrome and set, by default, PDF files to open in Google Chrome.

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