Pdf problems

How to fix those pdfs that are blank or half cut off?

[cheemo]

Ok, I know some of you will suggest avoiding pdf files but unfortunately that is not possible.

Here is the problem. When a user clicks on a pdf on our website one of the following happens:
- pdf displays correctly
- pdf is blank
- pdf is half cut off
- the pdf file is displayed on the screen in gibberish

I know one solution is to tell users to right click and save the file but people don't like to listen. Is there any way to force the file to open in adobe and not the browser? How about any other suggestions (converting to html is not an option)?

[ShawnR]

Here is what I think is happening:

It is opening in Adobe (or whatever the visitor's favourite pdf viewer is). When you install Adobe (on a windows machine) it installs the standard adobe, as well as the browser plug-in. Not "running in Adobe" is not the problem, and if you got the stand-alone adobe viewer to open instead of the plug-in, the problem would not be solved.

The problem is that PDF takes longer to download. If your visitor waited, chances are the blank screen would eventually fill up.

But to answer your question directly, no there is no way an html file acn instruct a browser to run an arbitrary program on a visitor's computer... for security reasons which hopefully become obvious with some thought... and also, you would not want to do that as websites are generally designed to be cross-platform compatible.

Sorry that is not a solution, but hopefully an improved understanding of what is happening will lead you closer to the solution.

[cheemo]

I do understand why you cannot force pdfs to open in one program or another, that does make sense. However I'm still baffeled on this one. Some users can open our pdfs perfectly while others have problems. Surely someone else has encountered this annoyance?

[Jenstar]

Yes, that happens to my site quite a bit. The problem is incompatibility with older versions of Adobe Acrobat that your users have installed. This problem is particularly evident if you use embedded non-standard fonts.

My pdfs are made in version 5+ but many people are still running 4 or older (I had one last week still running version 2!). So the user needs to go and download the current version of Adobe Acrobat Reader (right now it is 6+)

Once they have the reader, they may have to download the pdf again - if they have saved it, the pdf will often retain the error formatting, and still show the blank pages and garbled text.

The new version of Adobe Acrobat will solve this problem completely. I have not yet had a customer who was experiencing these problems you describe that the new Reader didn't solve.

[choster]

How large is the PDF? If it is exceptionally big, not only might it not have downloaded completely before the user attempts to read it, but they might have run out of memory or system resources.

We've occasionally had problems with proxy servers. The plug-in downloads the PDF in parts, rather than at once, so maybe there is opportunity for things to get lost. A much more serious problem was delivery over https, but that was supposedly corrected with Acrobat 4.

The Acrobat plugin is very slow on Netscape 6+ and Mozilla, and I often crash if I have the Acrobat application open when the plugin to view from within Mozilla starts.

The only workaround we've tried is adding guidance to right-click (or on Macs, click and hold) and "save as" if the document fails to appear correctly in the browser.