Android Webview cannot render the pdf sometimes and shows blank/white page instead

Question

• Open the pdf in the webview using google docs
• Open the same pdf or different pdf again and again.
• Sometimes it will show the blank/white page in the

Answer 1

After testing second PDF URL file, WebView seems like that can not load large PDF file.

Reason:

WebView display HTML. The fact that this works at all is by a hack- google will convert simple PDFs into HTML. It doesn't seem like they support anything that big. Even if they did, I would expect loading a large page PDF converted to HTML would be so large I highly doubt you'd be able to load it without going OOM. Use an appropriate PDF library, make a real PDF rendering view, and make sure not to render more of the PDF at a time than you need (or else you'll go OOM anyway). In other words, don't rely on hacky solutions you never should have relied on in the first place.

Solution:

You should try alternatives like PDF.js running locally in your device, instead of a service like Google Docs preview.(Or download PDF first to local file path)

Put it in your assets folder and tweak the example:

wv.loadUrl("file:///android_asset/web/viewer.html");

Also, you can have Out Of Memory situations. An alternative to try is a native viewer like AndroidPdfViewer.