Kiosk app on ChromeOS - view PDF in webview

[Steve Kersley]

Should it be possible (and if so, how) to view a PDF in a simple kiosk webview app?

I've written an internal application to be pushed out to a number of managed ChromeOS devices in our libraries to search the catalogs etc. It doesn't do much, just implements some basic black/whitelisting of URLs and ensuring that links open in the single webview window (as many links on the pages are normally set to open in a new window).

That all works fine, but it doesn't seem to be possible to click on a link to a PDF, it just results in a blank page.  I have also installed my app on my PC, where it will view a PDF correctly as expected.  It is only when run on the Chrome OS device as a kiosk app that PDFs won't open.

So, is there any way to handle PDFs, or is this simply not possible due to the nature of kiosk mode (or a limitation of Chrome OS)?  Are there any permissions necessary to allow this?  (I'm speculating that it needs to download the file to local storage, then open it as a local file, which it can't?)

Searching online, I found Chromium issue 481838 which appears to be what I'm seeing, but there didn't seem to be a consensus whether it was a bug or had never worked, and not sure if it was a browser-only issue or a Chrome OS issue.

Thanks,

Steve.