Selecting text in a PDF now follows your finger, and the page moves with it.
Dragging a selection
A drag would climb a few lines, freeze, then jump, taking a heading or the rest of a paragraph with it.
A text layer only covers the words themselves, so the space between lines, beside a short line, and out in a page's margins belonged to nothing a finger could land on. A touch that missed every word got the same answer wherever it was, and that was the freeze. Lines are now given the space around them, out to the next word along and to the page edges, and the margin between two pages is bridged so a selection can cross it. Nothing moves on the page: the words are where they always were, and a highlight still hugs the text.
Dragging to the top or bottom of the screen also scrolls the document, so a selection can run past the fold without letting go and starting again.
Closes #22, reported by @XZY123lol, whose video and files are what made it findable. The black screen in the first of those videos is a separate thing that has not been reproduced, so please do open a new issue if it happens again.
The home screen
Removing a granted folder asks first. It is the only thing on that screen that cannot be undone, since Android has no way to hand a released permission back. A recent file still goes on the long press alone.
Screen readers name the gesture: a row that can be removed reads as "double tap and hold to Remove" rather than an unnamed long press.
Removing several things quickly shows one "Removed" badge rather than one per removal, which used to keep a badge on screen for another half a minute after the last one.
While a document is being built
That line now sits in the middle of the screen rather than at the top, and it is legible in Word, slide, spreadsheet and image documents, where it had been shrinking to about 40% of the size it was written at. Errors and the PDF password prompt sit there too.
Install
Gander-1.16.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:
ff0beccaa946c2b08c58dedd38acad79823889d573a58ea30ff9204fd647ec1a
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.