This is the only board I know of where it’s standard to give a warning when linking to a PDF file. Why is this?
- Some people don’t have Adobe installed on their computers.
- It takes a long time to download a PDF on dial up.
- PDF crashes some peoples browsers.
All good reasons from HUP, but there is one other annoying one even for those with huge bandwidth and high speed…
That Adobe startup screen that comes up when you launch a PDF, even if it is inline in your browser. You can have the fastest commercially available computer and that thing still seems to take forever. It should be noted that the PDF still has to download AFTER that splash screen appears, to add to the annoyance factor.
When you have Adobe running go to the Edit menu and click Preferences. Then click Startup and untick the ‘Display splash screen’ box.
No more splash screen.
I found Preferences under the File menu, at least in the Mac version of Adobe Reader.
- People whose PCs have problems with PDFs sometimes forget to look at the browser status line to check if a linnk goes to a PDF.
Also, the full URL doesn’t always show up in the status bar.