Open PDF file on the fly from a Java application

Question

Is there any way to have a code that opens a PDF file in Java application in a platform independant way? I mean using a batch file in Windows could do that. Is there any other way to have a platform independent code to open PDF files on the fly?

Answer 1

I'd try Desktop.open(File), which:

Launches the associated application to open the file.

So this code should do the trick:

if (Desktop.isDesktopSupported()) {
    try {
        File myFile = new File("/path/to/file.pdf");
        Desktop.getDesktop().open(myFile);
    } catch (IOException ex) {
        // no application registered for PDFs
    }
}

Answer 2

You can use Runtime to execute and script and there are also several Java PDF viewers out there (ie Icepdf, JPedal, PDFRenderer).