In many threads, you see dopers who include a link in their posts that goes to a PDF file and explicitly say so in their texts. Why this? Is there some security concern about opening a PDF file from the internet that might make people shrink away from clicking the link?
Not security, but many .pdfs are very large files. Users on dialup may want to be advised before they try to download them.
Some people also read the boards from machines that don’t have the Adobe Reader software installed for whatever reason. Giving the heads-up that a file is a .pdf is a courtesy for them, too.
Also, quite a few people have imperfectly-configured browser integration of Acrobat Reader, so their browsers (and sometimes even their whole computers) crash if they absentmindedly click on a PDF.
Here’s a link to a previous thread on the topic. Apparently PDFs sometimes crash people’s browsers.
There was also this discussiom: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=314607
I notice that nobody has mentioned this thread yet 
Don’t forget this one either.
Yeah, much as i love Firefox, the Acrobat plug-in for it is pretty awful. It frequently crashes the browser.
It’s best, if you have Firefox, to just turn off the plug-in and set your Firefox options to download pdf files to your hard drive.
What they said.
Thanks, everyone.
TubaDiva
Even if it doesn’t crash the browser, it’s a pain in the ass to essential open a new application & document without meaning to.
I understand why some people don’t like PDFs, but there still doesn’t need to be a warning for them. Just hover your mouse over the link and in the status bar below the window, it will tell you it’s pointing to a PDF. I never randomly click open links anymore, I always see where exactly it’s pointing me to, and everyone else should, too. Just a good habit to get into.
I used to really hate pdfs on Google. It would say pdf, but I’d hit it before I realized and it would take forever for me to get control back.
But that was the old Acrobat Reader (5.0 was the worst!) As they added features the loading time went toward hell.
If you have a slow version, **get the new one (7.0) **and it loads most pages many times faster.
It’s not always easy to tell when a link leads to a PDF. Sometimes URLs can be very long, or they may point to some dynamic document retrieval system. Is it immediately clear that this URL points to a PDF?
Even if it is obvious by the URL, and you are in the habit of looking at every URL, it is easy to slip up every now and then and click it accidentally. Giving a warning is just a nice thing to do.
If you are linking to a pdf on the web, chances are Google has indexed it and converted it to html (it’s really just their method of caching pdf’s). Take the url to the pdf and plug it into Google, e.g., http://www.google.com/search?q=foreign.senate.gov/treaties.pdf.
If they have converted it, you’ll see a “View as HTML” link, e.g., http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:AtxkQ724jmsJ:foreign.senate.gov/treaties.pdf. You may want to link to that instead, or both.
alterego The Google View as HTML pages can be quite strange. Much of the font and layout information is lost and even diagrams come out in odd sizes and positions. In addition, it can tale forever to do a word search on those. A pdf formatted page is best viewed with a pdf reader.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you’re going to give a pdf warning you may as well do it in style.
When downloaded, where specifically are PDF files stored? I want to delete.
They should be stored wherever you tell the computer to put them.
In Firefox, which is the browser i use, go to Tools > Options and click on the Downloads tab. It gives you two options:
a) “Ask me where to save every file”
and
b) “Save all files to this folder”
With (a), every time you download a fiule you will choose the location. With (b), it will automatically put all your downloads in a folder selected by you.
It’s different if you just open the file in the browser using the pdf plug-in. In that case, i assume that the file goes in your cache, or Temporary Internet Files. Where this is will depend on what browser you’re using.
I refer you to the discussion in the link I and others posted earlier.
In thread I referred to, I posted the easiest solution: let the board software format the link automatically.