Question

I want to open a PDF from matlab with the winopen or open function. I want to use just the Adobe PDF reader for my program but in general want the default application for windows to be Adobe professional. Is there a way to make sure that the Adobe reader is opened and that it opens the file I want opened without having to use Adobe professional and changing my default settings for preferences?

I want to be able to do something like this:

x = 'row6col8.pdf'
!start acrord32.exe x

But this does not work any ways around this?

Answer 1

The winopen documentation indicates that the program used to open the file is determined by the filename’s extension.

Couldn’t you use system commands via !your-pdf-viewer file.pdf from matlab, and specify which pdf viewer to use and which pdf file to view? Something like:

>> !start acrord32.exe file.pdf

I am not on a windows machine, so I am not sure how of the exact commands to open files from the windows terminal…

Edit:

I see. You could then do:

x = 'filename.pdf';
str = sprintf('start acrord32.exe %s', x);
system(str);