Viewing PDF files using plugin

[jpmunson]

Team,

Has anyone had trouble clicking on a pdf attachment in VB, and the Adobe acrobat plugin fails to launch? Instead, an activeX icon appears on a new page. I'm using IE 5.5. I am able to right-click on the URL and Save As.. Any ideas?

-Jason

[Steve Machol]

This happens to me too. I've even unintstalled and reinstalled Acrobat but nothing works.

[JJR512]

Related question...

I see that pdf is not by default a valid attachment extension. If I want to enable it, is adding pdf to the valid extensions in the admin options cp all I have to do?

[jpmunson]

attachment types

Yeah, just enter the extension in the CP. (you should also add an icon for the attachment types in your Images directory, i.e. pdf.gif for your pdf attachments)

I know the standard M$ extensions, like ppt, xls, and doc work great. Just clicking on them brings up the application and file. But why doesn't the same hold true for the PDF files? If you open an FTP site in the browser, you can click on a PDF file and it'll launch the Acrobat Reader plugin. Why not when it's an attachment on he forums?

Thanks!

-Jason

[Wally Hartshorn]

Alas, Me Too

Originally posted by jpmunson
Has anyone had trouble clicking on a pdf attachment in VB, and the Adobe acrobat plugin fails to launch? Instead, an activeX icon appears on a new page. I'm using IE 5.5. I am able to right-click on the URL and Save As.. Any ideas?

I'm seeing the exact same behavior (and came here to post this as a question, actually). Is this a bug, or is a limitation of vB?

I also tried it with Netscape 4.7, and was told that "You have started to download a file of type unknown/unknown."

Using Netscape 6.0, I get the same type of error message.

Is there something in attachment.php that needs to be tweaked?

[Steve Machol]

FWIW this happens to me with all PDF files, not just those from vBulletin forums. I've never been able to find a fix. Even uninstalling and reinstalling Acrobat doesn't help.

[helmut]

adobe acrobat pdf attachments

Uploading Pdf Attachment
hello,

i dont know if anybody else noticed a problem clicking on a link for an uploaded pdf attachment. i could not find any post here.

in my vb2 RC2 installation on w2k/iis5 i could not view the document but received a browser error -> "mime type unknown".
vb2 is not using the configured web server default mime types for attachments. the header information is created in attachment.php.

i solved this issue by adding some code to attachment.php

right after the statements for gif and jpg pls. add following:

} elseif ($extension=="pdf") {
header("Content-type: application/pdf");

best regards

[Wally Hartshorn]

I did the same thing to enable PDF viewing. It would be nice if there were some way to do this without modifying the attachment.php file. Perhaps a config file that would contain this information.

[Chris Schreiber]

Originally posted by Wally Hartshorn
It would be nice if there were some way to do this without modifying the attachment.php file. Perhaps a config file that would contain this information.

This has been suggested to add a modifable list of mime types, and will probably be added in 2.1

[bill]

it works now

I had no problems with pdf files until I installed some of Microsoft's Critical Updates to my IIS4 server. After doing that all users got the activeX error, where before they just went to the pdf files.

Following helmut's suggestion to add

} elseif ($extension=="pdf") { 
header("Content-type: application/pdf"); 

to the attachment.php seems to have fixed everything.

[Thomas P]

Hi there,

thanks Jason for bringing this up and thanks to helmut for solving this

Great!
-Tom