Bill said:
Jeff,
I don't use Firefox but I checked my browser settings but I do not
find a "display pdfs in the Browser" block!
Bill
OK, here, I've enabled opening PDF documents in my browser. The upper
half of this image, shows the "Save a Copy" button near the upper
left of the screen. What that should do, is save a copy from your
Temporary Internet folder to a place of your choosing. It's not meant
to encourage editing - most of the time, if the button works at all,
all it's doing is transferring the downloaded file somewhere where
you'll find it.
http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/9913/changethesetting.gif
To me, viewing PDF files inside the browser window, as I've done
in the example, is a brain dead thing to do. For precisely the reason
you're discovering. Many things don't work properly in the browser.
And, in addition, there are some exploits that can be performed that
way. Say the "Save a Copy" button is not working. What you really
want, is to *stop opening PDFs in the browser window* .
So what I want you to do instead, is go to your list of programs
and find the program for Adobe Acrobat Reader. When you open it
from Start, you should end up with a blank document. Now, look
in Edit : Preferences. There will be a tab called "Internet".
Click the tab. It will say "Web Browser Options". Locate the
box labeled "Display PDF in browser" and *untick* the box.
Click OK at the bottom. You can leave Acrobat running if you
want, or close the blank Adobe Reader window.
Now, go back to your Internet browser. You'd typed
http://c.mfcreative.com/pdf/trees/charts/1790.pdf
in the browser. After having made the change to the preference
inside Adobe Acrobat Reader, when you enter the URL this time
in the browser, instead of the PDF opening in the browser
window, you'll *immediately* be given a chance to save the
document.
*******
While you're in the Edit : Preferences thing in Acrobat,
you should also locate the Javascript preference, and make
sure it's disabled. PDF documents can have Javascript code
(executable) inside them. Some browsers, they scan the PDF
for executable code. But I've since learned, that the
code can be obfuscated (hidden) by the nature of the
design of PDFs. (Someone wrote an article, about how
the Javascript can be hidden, and twits who make the
PDFs will be getting ideas from the article.) So there
is no guarantee that perhaps anything other than an AV/malware
checker program can prevent you from being infected by one.
If you disable the Javascript preference inside the
Edit : Preferences thing in Adobe Acrobat Reader, it
provides one more barrier to being infected by
malicious PDFs off the web. Obfuscated or not, disabling
Javascript should stop malignant PDFs in their tracks.
Paul
