Pale Moon forum

I have two old Macs. One runs Lion and the other Mtn Lion. On both Macs, I have installed Palemoon 29.1.0 for the Mac and Adobe Acrobat Reader v11.0.23 (which I believe is the last version that runs on Lion / Mtn Lion).

In the Add-ons Manager, Palemoon shows the Adobe Acrobat Reader Plugin installed and "always" activated.

But whenever I try to view a PDF within Palemoon, nothing happens. I just see a blank screen. The plugin does not seem to work.
Any ideas?

If it is not possible to make the plugin to work, is there a way for Palemoon to automatically open up the PDF in Adobe Reader?

This is probably not the answer you want but if I were you then I'd just use pdf.js

Macintosh is discontinued. See: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=26381

Ah yes, that too

Preferences -> Applications - you should be able to set it to open in your system-set PDF reader there.

Moonchild wrote: ↑

2021-03-11, 12:57

Preferences -> Applications - you should be able to set it to open in your system-set PDF reader there.

Thanks Moonchild. But I suspect that the real problem lies with this Preference setting.

Under Preferences -> Applications on both of my Palemoon for the Mac installations, "Portable Document Format (PDF)" is NOT explicitly listed as a content type. I see the following however:

• Adobe Acrobat FDF document
  Adobe XML Data Package File
  Adobe Form Client Data File

I changed all of the above to Acrobat Reader NPAPI Plugin but that did not make a difference. I also tried changing all of the above to "Adobe Acrobat Reader". I was not able open up a PDF document within the Palemoon browser or using Acrobat Reader. I just see a blank Palemoon window.

There is a "Preview Document" document type listed under Preferences -> Applications. On the Mac, Apple's Preview App can open and display PDF files. It was set to Adobe Acrobat NPAPI Plugin. (But that setting did not work). I changed it to PREVIEW to see if Preview would open up when I clicked on a PDF file within Palemoon. But again nothing happened. I just see a blank Palemoon window.

I suspect what I really need to change if the "PDF" document type but it is not listed in Preferences -> Applications in Palemoon for the Mac.
Is there a text file containing these content types that I can modify and add the PDF content type? Or is this a software bug fix (which I realize is unlikely to happen now because Mac OS X is being officially dropped as a supported OS).

Those types are listed based on what is registered in the O.S. - unfortunately I can't help you with that on Mac as I don't know that registration is done in MacOS.
What you should be able to do though is at least disable the PDF plug-in in your add-on manager.
Open the add-on manager, -> Plugins -> PDF plugin -> click the "Disable" button. That should prevent the plugin from being used so the browser is then forced to use an external program. You should be able to pick the program to use on next loading a PDF.

Thanks Moonchild.

I was finally able to get Palemoon to open up Adobe Reader when I clicked a PDF link on a webpage.

I had to do two steps:

• 1. Disable the Adobe Reader NPAPI Plugin via the Add-Ons Manager, and
  2. Change the setting in Preferences -> Applications for the "Preview" content type from "Save File" to "Adobe Reader"

It sure looks like the "Preview" content type in Preferences -> Applications handles the "PDF" content type on Mac OS.
But unfortunately, when the "Preview" content type is associated with the Adobe Reader NPAPI Plugin (and the Adobe Reader NPAPI Plugin is activated via the Add-Ons Manager), PDF's do NOT open up in Palemoon. One just sees blank windows.

The only workaround is as described above which forces Palemoon to open up PDF's in Adobe Reader.