Firefox plug-in views PDF as ASCII text

[denzil]

Using Win7 Pro 64 bit, with Firefox 13, I recently upgraded to PDF_X viewer version 2.5. Clicking on a link to a PDF from a web page, the document loads but displays in plain text i.e, not the document text but as if you open a PDF in a text editor. The plug-in is enabled, I have also disabled the Adobe Acrobat plug-in.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello denzil,

And welcome to our forums!

Does this happen with a particular file only or with any file?
If it's a specific file/link and it does not contain confidential information - please post it here in the forums so that we can attempt to reproduce that.

Additionally - please try to "save linked content" - and instead of opening the link directly in the browser attempt to save that PDF locally on your hard drive and see if you can open the file from there.

Best,
Stefan

[denzil]

Interesting - the problem seems to be only with PDFs linked on a company intranet, so I can't give you a link. If I right click the link and "Save link as..." to download a copy it works fine. If I click on a linked PDF on a website it doesn't attempt to load in the plug-in, but just downloads a copy.

The intranet is a wiki, so links to files are in the form file:///location rather than http:///location, if that helps.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi Denzi,

Thanks for the details. So there might be something not quite right in the source/scrypts in your intranet that does not start streaming the content "properly" - and as a result your browser tries to display as plain text the content that should actually be a PDF file.

Please check these KB article and see if changing your settings to match those in the KB articles will make the files opened with our Viewer instead of rendered as plain text:
I have a problem with opening pdf files directly inside a tab in Firefox. They open in the stand-alone Viewer

How do I set PDF-XChange Viewer as the default method for displaying on-line PDF documents in Mozilla Firefox?

Best,
Stefan

P.S. I just deleted the duplicate topic.

[denzil]

1st KB article: All the Adobe Acrobat file types are currently set to " Use PDF-XChange Viewer". This points to C:Program Files/.../PDFXCView.exe which might explain why website links are downloading instead of using the plug-in. The article seems to be telling me to set it to "Use Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox)", but that option isn't there, even though the Adobe Acrobat plug-in is enabled. There is no option that I can see to select the PDFX plug-in either. I have tried disabling the Adobe Acrobat plug-in as well, and disabling/enabling the PDFX plug-in, but it doesn't make a difference.

2nd KB article: I already have the "Display PDF in browser" option ticked.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Thanks for the follow up denzil,

Could I please ask you to try and reinstall both FireFox and our Viewer - with Firefox being installed first - and see if this will fix the situation?

Best,
Stefan

[denzil]

I have tried that today, and the behaviour is the same. If it makes a difference, I uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox, but didn't delete the profile.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi denzil,

Could you please send a screenshot of one such document displayed as plain text in your browser and particularly the start of such a "page" in Firefox.
I want to see whether what's displayed is the actual PDF content or some other text e.g. HTML code.
(you will need to archive any images before attaching them to the forums)

Also - Firefox being a Web browser uses mime type rather than a file extension for associating the application to open a file. Can you tell us what mime type you get on this file when recieving it from your Intranet? We obviously cannot access that to check ourselves.

Best,
Stefan

[denzil]

Sorry for delayed reply. Screenshot attached. How do I check what the MIME type is?

Edit: I have tried attaching it as a PNG and a JPG, but it says those extensions are not allowed. What image format should I be using?

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi denzil,

Please archive the image first - and then attach the archive to this topic.

Best,
Stefan

[denzil]

So, by archive you mean a ZIP or similar. OK, I get it.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Thanks for the screen-shot denzil,

This is indeed the actual content of the file that FireFox displays for you as plain text.
Could you please try to change the file address from
the current
file:///R:...
to
file://localhost/R:...
and see if that helps.

Best,
Stefan

[denzil]

Nope, tried that, same behaviour.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi Denzi,

Do you have another browser installed on your machine and does the file display properly if you try to view it in that other browser?

Best,
Stefan

[denzil]

I have IE9, so tried that and it works fine, for both internal wiki links and www links. I much prefer using Firefox, though, so would rather that was fixed!

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi Denzil,

Yes I can understand your desire - but it seems to be specific to your local PC as we have not seen this reported elsewhere.
I am an Opera user - so can't say I know FireFox in details, but I noticed that the current latest version is 14 - and you said at the start of this topic you had v13 - have you updated FF to the latest version and is this still a problem in v14?

Best,
Stefan

[denzil]

Yes, I have updated to FF14 and the problem is still there. Am I really the only person it doesn't work for?

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi denzil,

Yes unfortunately you are the only one to have reported this so far.
Have you tried to uninstall both our Viewer and FireFox, reboot and then install them back?
If you have not - please do try, and make sure to uninstall the Viewer first and then install it back second - so that our installer could make the proper associations within FireFox.

Best,
Stefan

[denzil]

I have already tried that. Still, I have found a workaround for now - I have installed the IE Tab Plus add-on, and if I right click a link and open with the IE rendering engine it works OK.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi Denzil,

Glad to hear that you found a workaround, and sorry that we could not help more - but this is something only you are experiencing and I feel this might be due to some specific setting at your end.

If FireFox allows this - try exporting all your settings to a back-up file, and then try resetting everything to the defaults - and see if this will still cause PDF files to open as text only.

Best,
Stefan

[Arnold]

I have been having the same problem with some sites for a few weeks also. Happened again tonight trying to read an addendum from bbbid@thebluebook.com. Pdf opened as a text file. Has been happening on this site and isqft10 which are both sites that many contractors use to distribute bid documents in pdf format. I thought the problem was on their sites, but now I am not so sure. The file opened fine in the Viewer the minute I disabled the Firefox plugin. Windows XP sp3 and Firefox 16. Thanks.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi Arnold,

Seems there's something specific to these sites that FireFox is probably not handling correctly - maybe there are some file type headers that the website doesn't send (or sends incorrectly) and FF can't recover from this incorrectly sent info.

For the moment we do not know more as we are unable to reproduce it at our end but thanks for reporting it - as if we get a few more reports we could spend some more time investigating this.

Best,
Stefan