Is it possible to control how the user sees a PDF?

[paul_montei]

I have created a PDF in indesign with a simple hyperlink navigation to be posted on a website. When the the PDF loads in the browser, it is in single page continuous and the hyperlinks don't work. I have page view in DC set to single page.

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[BobLevine]

PDF in a browser is a crapshoot. If you’ve set the initial view in Acrobat and the browser is not honoring it, there’s no a lot you can do. It’s certainly not related to InDesign…you can check in the Acrobat forum.

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

To be a bit more specific …

If you are viewing a PDF file in a browser for which the Adobe Reader / Acrobat plug-in is active, the functionality of the PDF as well as well as the document and Reader / Acrobat display preferences are preserved.

Unfortunately, over the last few years, browser vendors have gone to great lengths to either deprecate the plug-in mechanisms that Reader / Acrobat has for displaying PDF within the browser or have made it such that you have to jump through flaming hoops to get the plug-in to work.

For popular browsers:

     Internet Explorer - Reader / Acrobat plug-in works without any issues.

     Microsoft Edge (Windows 10-only) - has no plug-in mechanism and uses a dicey Microsoft PDF viewer.

     Safari (MacOS) - supports the Reader / Acrobat plug-in, but you need to manually go into the browsers configuration to enable the plug-in.

     Firefox - abandoned the plug-in mechanism that supported the Reader / Acrobat plug-in and uses their own PDF viewer, known to be a bit problematic. Best bet is to download PDF files to a directory and open in Reader / Acrobat manually.

     Google Chrome - abandoned the plug-in mechanism that supported the Reader / Acrobat plug-in and uses their own PDF viewer, known to be a bit problematic. Best bet is to disable the built-in PDF viewer which forces the PDF file to be downloaded for viewing in Reader / Acrobat.

Yes, this is painful!

          - Dov

[BobLevine]

Thanks for that, Dov. I think I'll bookmark this one.

[rob day]

Unfortunately, over the last few years, browser vendors have gone to great lengths to either deprecate the plug-in mechanisms that Reader / Acrobat has for displaying PDF within the browser or have made it such that you have to jump through flaming hoops to get the plug-in to work.

And maybe for good reason as the majority of browsing shifts to mobile devices and with the security issues that a plugin might create.

Even Safari with the plugin is ignoring my PDF's saved initial view settings.

I think an analogy would be HTML in email, where the code has to be dumbed down—tables only with inline styling, no DIVs, no CSS. So for PDF it would be sRGB with no live transparency, and in a world where convenience is everything I wouldn't bet on a download.