Why is Quicktime even involved with PDFs? Didn’t used to be. Anyways, recently every time I click on a PDF to download, it doesn’t actually download. It opens up a new window with a Quicktime logo, and I get the first page of whatever it is with no scroll bars or controls or way to, you know, look at page two. This happens on websites as diverse as NBC.com to the New Jersey Supreme Court homepage and I find it hard to believe that every website I happen to stumble on has simultaneously changed so I figure it has to be something with my setup, even though AFAIK nothing’s changed there either. Used to be I’d click on the Download button and it would download and let me read the document in Preview or an Adobe app. So any suggestions on how I can get PDFs which are supposed to be downloadable to actually download would be super.
Mac OS 10.2.8 using Safari 1.0 (yeah I know there are later versions of both out, none of which I can get or use at the moment).
If you’re using Firefox, go to Tools|Options|Downloads and click on the “View & Edit Actions” button. On the list of file types, find PDF and change its action to whatever you want it to do.
I’m sure there is a similar setting in IE, but I wasn’t able to quickly locate it.
No experience with anything earlier than 10.3.x but try ctrl+clicking on the link to bring up the contextual menu and choose “download linked file”. That might work.
Pdf files are often treated like a graphics file if it’s not properly associated with the Acrobat program or it’s equivalent. When I migrated my pdf files into my new computer, they became associated with the default Quicktime, which can open some graphics files. This was before I installed Irfanview and Adobe.
This might be the problem. You might have PDF files associated with Quicktime. Quicktime doesn’t do PDFs as far as I know. Preview is the app that should handle them. If you have any files that are PDFs, select one and Get Info (File>Get Info, or Cmd+I). You should have an option titled “Open with”. Select Preview from the dropdown menu. Hit the Change All button.
If this doesn’t work, you might also have a plugin problem. The Safari default should be set up to handle PDFs, but yours might be screwed up. The easiest way I can think of to fix it is to trash your Safari prefs file, (Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist) and reinstall Safari. Make a note of your version number. This is undoubtedly a drastic measure and I’m recommending it simply because I don’t know enough about earlier versions of OS X to tell you a more elegant solution.
You should be able to find Safari as a download online and I’m sure you have it on your install disks. Pacifist is an excellent tool for installing things in OS X, and will allow you to install just the Safari package without having to install the whole OS from scratch.
If you don’t want to try my admittedly under-informed solution, try OS X Hints, the support forums at Apple, or another hint site to see if anyone else has had a similar problem.
One thing I sometimes do when I have problems opening a file of any type (though this is Windows not Mac) is to save the file to disk, open the relevant program (e.g. Adobe Acrobat) and then open the file from the disk directly in the program.
This gets around the problem when what the program is to automatically open is miscoded.