Friday, March 25, 2011

Adobe X not opening PDF in IE8 window

A customer recently asked for help with an issue involving the new Adobe X Reader and Internet Explorer 8.  In some web sites with scripting opening a pdf in a new window, the window would remain blank and eventually give an error.
It seemed as though it would only open correctly once per reboot.  This was extremely frustrating for the customer.

With a little research and testing, we were able to fix the issue by doing the following:

1. Open Adobe Reader X.
2. Press "Ctrl K"
3. Select General Category from the left pane
4. Uncheck the "Enable Protected Mode at Startup" checkbox
5. Click on "Internet" in the left pane
6. Uncheck everything in the window except "Display PDF in browser"
7. Press "OK"
8. Close Adobe X and try to open the document again.

It may not be necessary to uncheck all of these items but this is what we did and it resolved the issue.
I hope this can help someone else save some time.

I should add, another customer mentioned having this same issue 3 days after finding this solution. He was very happy to know there was a simple fix to the problem.

11 comments:

  1. Thank you for this. We were testing a huge number of imported course files, and couldn't get links to initialize. if we hadn't found your instruction, we might have sent the entire pile back to the vendor!

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  2. Yeah this didnt help me. The only way I can get it to work is to display the PDF not in the browser

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  3. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

    This has been doing my head in for weeks, we have a number of staff that have been seeing this problem and this has been the only solution.

    Thanks for posting.

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  4. This was so helpful. Thank you very much.

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  5. It didn't work with me either, I also had to uncheck the "Display PDF in browser" option. The PDFs don't open in the browser, but at least they open with out a Run Time error! Thanks!

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  6. Love you bro! The fix works great.

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  7. another fix is to install Chrome or Firefox. :)

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  8. There is no "Enable Protected Mode at Startup" checkbox in Reader X. Nor in Acrobat Pro X for that matter.

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  9. It's on the "Security (Enhanced)" tab, not the "General" tab.

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