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View PDF files in Safari with Reader 7
Authored by: robg on Jan 24, '05 06:21:46PM
Reader Richard Glaser sent the following comment to me via email, and gave me permission to post it here with his name. Everything in the box below is from Richard's email (I added rearranged some line breaks, added a clarifying word in a sentence or two, and changed raw URLs to hyperlinks, but that's it)...

I wanted to comment on Adobe Reader 7 PDF implementation from security and administrative perspective. Note, many installers and/or applications cause burden for enterprise, and anybody who manages a group of open Mac OS X boxes, from security issues, like world writes, improper install location, preference hierarchy, etc.

Many of these issues are outlined in the white paper Mac OS X Enterprise Application Management Best Practices", and my group's web page Application Deployment Problems and Solutions. One thing to note, with the latest release of Adobe Reader 7 is that it comes with and installs a PDF plugin for Safari. They don't mention this at all on their What's New page. I would think they would want to highlight this feature, since it's been requested so much...

The bad thing is that the PDF plugin doesn't offer feature parity with the Windows version of the PDF plugin, and is really poorly implemented from a administrative/security standpoint. For example, the digital management solution CONTENTdm will display images inline with the Windows version of the PDF plugin, but not any Mac OS X version from Adobe or Shubert-It. There are many other example of lack of support on the Mac OS X side of the PDF plugin vs PC, which I hope someone (Adobe, Apple, Shubert-It) fixes it. Anyway, back to the poor security/administrative implementation off Adobe Reader 7...

For example, the Adobe Reader 7 installer, installs a world-writable Frameworks folder inside the Safari.app package, containing aliases to items inside the Adobe Reader 7.app package. If you remove this folder then view a PDF with Safari, AdobePDFViewer.plugin copies it right back into place (with permissions set to 777, of course). If the Frameworks folder is not there and you do not have write access to /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/, the plugin does not function with Safari - instead you get prompted to choose another application to view PDFs.

So if you want to use AdobePDFViewer.plugin in a lab environment, you will have to make sure the Frameworks folder is in place every time you update Safari (since you probably don't want to leave /Applications/Safari.app/Contents user-writable). Hmm, and if you rename your Safari to, say, "Safari 1.2.4" then try to view a PDF, AdobePDFViewer.plugin creates a dummy, empty app package /Applications/Safari.app, only containing the Frameworks folder full of aliases - and the PDF plugin still works!

So, you do have other PDF options, again it doesn't give you feature parity with the Windows Adobe PDF plugin, but is much nicer implementation and supports other browsers. It is called PDF Browser Plugin 2.1, you can get more info and download it via the link. Note, it is free to education.

-rob.

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View PDF files in Safari with Reader 7
Authored by: mark hunte on Jan 26, '05 06:58:01PM

I notice hayne pointed out that you can turn off a choice of plugins in the get info window for this app, Thats a hint in its self for me at least.

But I may have missed this in all the comments, you can turn off the browse in web browser by opening the app and going to preferences ->internet and un-tick the options there.

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mh



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View PDF files in Safari with Reader 7
Authored by: mark hunte on Jan 26, '05 07:07:04PM

Sorry that was Chris haynes (not Hayne) :)

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mh



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