Can't open a PDF with Camino 2.1.x

[steven_sbs]

Greetings, I upgraded my Camino from 2.0.9 to 2.1.0 (and then 2.1.1). Starting with 2.1.0, when I go to a web page and click on a pdf, I am prompted to 'select an Adobe Acrobat or Reader application to use'. Problem... All of the applications then listed are grayed out and can not be selected. How do I make Camino open the application Preview to view a pdf? With 2.0.9 the pdf would automatically download and open Preview right away. This all works fine for me in Firefox(3.6.15) and Safari. It stopped working with the upgrade to 2.1.0. I Installed 2.1.1 to see if that would fix the problem (as it fixed the url search function).

Thanks for your help.
MAC OS 10.5.8 PPC
Camino 2.1.1 - preference 'open downloaded files' = yes, Java and JavaScript both enabled.

[Uncle Asad]

Sounds like you have some strange PDF plug-in installed; if you choose "Installed Plug-Ins" from Camino's Help menu, what plug-ins that handle PDF files are installed (you can search for "PDF" on that page)?

[steven_sbs]

The about:plugins shows

Adobe Acrobat and Reader Plug-in

File: AdobePDFViewer.plugin
Version: 7.0.5
Adobe Acrobat and Reader Plug-in for Web Browsers, Version 7.0.5

"application/pdf Acrobat Portable Document Format pdf Yes"

Is there a way to change this to be the MAC Preview application?
Thanks

[Uncle Asad]

There are two ways to approach this:

1) If you don't want to use this Adobe plug-in in any of your browsers on your Mac, ever, uninstall it (or remove the "AdobePDFViewer.plugin" file from the ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins folder or the /Library/Internet Plug-Ins folder, whichever one has the file).

OR

2) If you want to just disable this Adobe plug-in for Camino, open about:config and set the camino.disabled_plugin_names hidden preference to "Adobe".

[steven_sbs]

Thank you so much for your help. I used the second option you suggested and it worked great. Now when I click on a pdf, it downloads and opens in Preview. Tell the boss I said you should get a pay raise.

[cflawson]

For whatever it's worth, it looks like the version of the Adobe PDF Plugin you're using is several years old; you might want to consider updating, too.

cl

[steven_sbs]

Thanks for the info about the old plugin. I've actually never used the adobe plugin or acrobat reader in all the years I've had this mac. When this problem started, the acrobat reader opened and I got some message like "Reader is opening for the first time...". That's when I knew something was wrong. I guess I need to do a better job of running updates. Thanks for the help.

[cflawson]

If you don't use it, you might as well uninstall it entirely. I find Reader to be much slower than Preview and much more of a hassle for PDF viewing so I got rid of it. (I don't ever really fill PDF forms, where Reader used to be somewhat better than Preview; if I had to do that regularly, I might keep Reader around.)

cl