Eventually found an answer to this problem, with some help for MATLAB, which was to open a PDF document:
% Open the PDF in the system Adobe application
if (ispc)
winopen(pdfPath);
elseif ismac
cmdToExecute = ['open ' pdfPath];
[status, path] = system(cmdToExecute); %#ok<ASGLU>
else
% using xdg-open to open a file in Linux. Some Linux systems might not have
% xdg-open .In that case displaying as error with the file path
cmdToExecute = ['xdg-open ' pdfPath];
[status, path] = system(cmdToExecute); %#ok<ASGLU>
end