HP Forums

Does HP 50 read PDF?

Is there any program able to open and to read it?

Do you seriously want to render a PDF on a 131×80 pixels screen?

To be clear, that was a no.

But I think you knew that and asked a silly question just to make it to 50 posts...

Surprisingly, I think It can be done with Open Fire Image Viewer.
You have to convert pdf to individual image, and convert that image to 16-shade grayscale with open fire image converter.
Output will be extension gro4. You can view this with open fire

Still seems like a 'no' to me...

... for two reasons:
- This doesn't appear very usable; obvious improvements would be downscaling the images and writing a new GROB viewer with gallery-style functionality for page flipping.
- You're technically not opening a PDF, you're opening screenshots of it. The hard part of PDF opening is rendering it, and the 50g still can't do that.

I remember writing an image decoder for the HP-48 so I could get weather maps from Compuserve with a little pocket modem.

It was a super simple format - I think RLE, maybe. Not particularly practical, but it was a good way to learn RPL. :-)

Yes, I didn't think about essence of pdf. This is not method viewing pdf. It was just viewing image.