Safari rebelling against default behavior?

greenbirdweb

Registered
Hello -

I recently got a brand-spankin' new G5 for work. Very nice. I maintain an Intranet website which makes extensive use of PDF files. As near as I can tell from looking at Apple's website and the online help for Safari, the application (Safari) is supposed to open PDF files in the browser window by default, beginning with the latest OS, which I have (10.4.3). However, anytime I click a link to a PDF file from my little website, Safari downloads the file to my desktop, then spawns the Preview application to view the file. This is pretty annoying. I would rather have Acrobat display the PDF file from right within the Safari window. I have the Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium. Acrobat is supposed to plug itself into Safari when installed. I changed the file type association for the OS. I have even tried trashing the PDFViewer plugin file from Library/Internet Plug-ins. Adobe says to open Acrobat and choose "Detect and Repair" from the Help menu. I have tried all these things, and stupid Safari keeps spawning Preview for PDF files.

Anyone else had this problem or know of a solution? Help would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Jeff
 
In order for Acrobat to display the file in Safari the AdobePDFViewer.plugin must be in /Library/ Internet Plug-Ins. First be sure you have the latest version of Acrobat which is 7.0.5. Then reinstall the AdobePDFViewer.plugin, you may have to reinstall Acrobat to do that. FWIW I prefer Adobe Reader for use in Safari to Acrobat -- it isn't quite so overwhelming and loads a bit faster.

You might also check System Preferences > Quicktime > Advanced > MIME Settings > Still Image Files and be sure "PDF Image" is unchecked and in Safari > Preferences > General be sure "Open 'safe' files after downloading" is checked.

Finally try deleting com.apple.safari.plist in your home folder ~/Library/Preferences.
 
Well, I downloaded the Reader, since it's supposedly a little faster loading. I trashed the .plugin and .plist files and restarted. Now when I click on a link to a PDF file, Safari downloads the file to the desktop (still not what I want) and opens it in Acrobat. Not Adobe Reader... full-blown Acrobat. In both Acrobat and Reader, in the Preferences->Internet box, "Display PDFs in browser using" is checked and the value is set to Adobe Reader 7.0.5. Why, then, is Safari continuing to download and open PDFs in Acrobat instead of simply viewing them with the Reader plug-in? :mad:
 
On a similar note -

On my little intranet website, when I click a link to a JPG file, I get the same behavior. The file is downloaded and then opened in Preview. I'm not sure if this is standard behavior or not. I would think that Safari ought to be able to just display the image by itself, much in the same way that IE does on the PC.

Sorry for the newb questions... I've only made the switch to Mac in the last month or so. Before that, everything at work was WinDoze! ::ha::
 
mdnky said:
Try viewing a PDF on an external site first...maybe you have an issue with your intranet server.

http://images.apple.com/macosx/pdf/tigermediaexchange.pdf (Tiger media exchange form from Apple.com)

mdnky - You were right! After following all the instructions from Adobe's web site and all the recommendations given here, it turns out that the problem only shows up when trying to view PDFs and JPGs from the server my site resides on (IIS/Win2K3... stoooopid WinDoze! :mad:). I tried an external site and it worked fine. I tried the Mac server I'll soon be moving my site to (bwahahaaaa!!! :D) and it worked perfectly. I also tried out the Schubert-it PDF Plug-in, and I like it as well. Now I just have to decide which one I like better!

Thanks (to everyone) for all your help! :)

Jeff
 
Congrats on the server move...it's definitely for the better.

I used the PDF plug-in for Safari under Panther and it was alright...but I like the built-in one to Safari under Tiger better. Just feels faster and better integrated to me.
 
I wish that Adobe's PDF Viewer worked in Firefox; it's superior to PDF Browser, especially since with PDF Browser you can't highlight and copy text, as far as I know.
 
I like Tiger's way of displaying PDFs in the browser window. I previously _never_ liked such behaviour, but something about Preview/Safari in Tiger is right. Probably the lightweight feeling about it.
 
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