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Google Chrome prepares two-page view for built-in PDF viewer

Viewing PDFs is easy thanks to built-in viewers on modern browsers, but third-party apps are usually more fully-featured. Now, it appears Google Chrome wants to close the gap just a bit with the arrival of a two-page view for the PDF viewer.

Spotted by TechDows in the latest Canary release of Google Chrome, it appears the two-page view is finally coming to the browser. This simple but useful feature just puts two pages of a PDF side-by-side on the screen, but that’s handy for the sake of reading more information or comparing portions of the same document.

Regardless of what you’ll use this for, it should arrive in stable builds of Google Chrome in the next several weeks. In the meantime, it hides within Canary builds under the flag chrome://flags/#pdf-two-up-view. By default, this isn’t active, but you can switch it to “enabled” and then restart your browser to have the change take effect.

Once enabled, the two-page view for PDFs in Google Chrome appears as an option on the right-hand toolbar. Above the zoom buttons, an “enable two-up view” appears. Unlike Microsoft Edge, this is the only way to access this view in Chrome where Edge allows flipping it on by pressing “F8” on the keyboard.

Keep an eye on our continued Google Chrome coverage to be notified when this feature rolls out more widely.

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