Topic: Serving "pdf" files in HTML

[Steve]

We serve up a lot of pdf files on our internal intranet. We have been using AnologX's neat web server called simpleserver on a WIN98 machine and never had a problem serving up pfd's. Now we are running e-smith and when ever a pdf file is opened in the browser it seems to load fine but will can not view/access more than the first page and a half. I have tried it using IE 5.0 / 5.5 with WIN98/WIN08SE/ME and Reader 3.0 to 4.05 and Acrobat 3.0 and 4.05. Same problem in all cases. If I attempt to view the third page the browser will hang. Single page pdfs are fine, the problem only appears when viewing multi page pdfs. I can download the pdfs to the individual machines and open them in Reader without any problems but this would defeat the purpose of using the intranet hosting the latest versions of those documents. These pdfs were created using Acrobat versions 3 to 4.05 and all have been optimized. Any ideas why this is happening? Everything else works great!

[Darrell May]

Steve wrote:
>
> We serve up a lot of pdf files on our internal intranet. We
> have been using AnologX's neat web server called simpleserver
> on a WIN98 machine and never had a problem serving up pfd's.
> Now we are running e-smith and when ever a pdf file is opened
> in the browser it seems to load fine but will can not
> view/access more than the first page and a half.

Do you receive an 'internal error' in the pdf viewer?

Darrell

[Steve]

Darrell, I do not receive an internal error in the pdf viewer. I think the problem is occuring on e-smith because I can view all pdf files fine in IE if I copy the entire contents of the "primary - html" directory onto a local machine and open and browse with IE or as I said earlier use simplerserver on a windows machine. Does anyone else serve "pdf" files using e-smith. I am assuming it must be a common practice.

[SAVIN Jérome]

Hello,

My company serve PDF files on Primary WebSite at www.gepdiff.com
PDF are in distribution section in left menu and with IE 5.5 and Win2000 I have the same problem in page 3 of each PDF , IE hangs ...

Jérome

[Noah]

Here is a solution which should solve your problem.  Start up Acrobat, and go to File --> Preference --> General.  Turn off Web Browser Integration.  This will force IE to launch a Adobe on its own rather than using the in-browser plug-in.

Unfortunately, this is a client side solution, so all of your users are going to have to do this.  

The problem seems to only occur with PDF files created on a Windows system and served by a Linux/Unix server.  Files created on non-Windows systems seem un-affected.

Good luck.

Noah

[Steve]

Thanks Noah, your solution has solved the problem.

Steve

[Darrell May]

Noah wrote:
>
> Here is a solution which should solve your problem.  Start up
> Acrobat, and go to File --> Preference --> General.  Turn off
> Web Browser Integration.  This will force IE to launch a
> Adobe on its own rather than using the in-browser plug-in.
>
> Unfortunately, this is a client side solution, so all of your
> users are going to have to do this.
>

Right, we've been discussing this issue on devinfo and here is something else I would like everyone to try and report if this makes any improvement at all.

After further troubleshooting I feel the problem may lie in the httpd.conf file.  I won't say I have this solved as yet but simply adding this template fragment and restarting httpd has been reported to work for two of us.  

/etc/e-smith/templates-custom/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/75AddType05.pdf

 AddType application/pdf .pdf
 AddDescription "Adobe Portable Document Format" .pdf

/sbin/e-smith/expand-template /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart

For those following this thread, please try the above and let me know if you see an improvement as well.  Again, I don't consider this solved, just getting better results so I feel I may be on the right track.

Regards,

Darrell