Reader 9 does not open LiveCycle protected PDF's on OSX

[M_20]

My daughter uses an electronic online learning environment at school. This website contains PDF's that are protected with Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management. But Adobe Reader (latest version 9.3.4) cannot open these PDF's. It shows an error dialog stating that "You can only open this document when connected to the network". As you might have guessed, we are connected to the network already.

It gets even more interesting when we e-mail the PDF's to other people. These files can be opened under Windows and under Linux with no problems, in IE and FireFox. This even works without logging in to the e-learning website! But although it is possible to open the document on a Mac, which has a size of about 2.9 MB, its contents stays completely blank.

I tried this on 3 Mac's, from 3 different networks, with all combinations of Safari, Firefox, Preview and Adobe Reader. With and without the OSX firewall enabled, and using both OSX 10.5 and 10.6. I am using the latest versions of all software, all with the default preferences after standard installation.

I would really like some suggestions on how to solve this. The school cannot help, the e-learning platform company does not want to help because they do not support "individual cases" and the content provider (publisher of the PDF's) does not respond to my questions by e-mail.

[Jasmin_Charbonn]

The error message is a bit misleading.

This is most likely related to the certificate used by the browser to make the the HTTPS connection from the PDF to the Rights Management server.

You have to make sure the certificate is installed properly in the browser you're using to avoid this error message.

One way to quickly test is to hit https://<rights_management_servername>:<port>; and see if the browser gives  you a prompt to install a certificate. If it does, then install it.

Close the browser and try to hit that URL again. You want to make sure you can hit https://<rights_management_servername>:<port>; without a prompt to install a certificate.

This is actually what Acrobat/Reader is trying to do. Acrobat uses a browser object and if it can't connect to the the URL without a prompt, it'll throw the error message you're getting.

I hpoe this helps.

Jasmin

[M_20]

Jasmin, thank you for your answer. I think I do not know the proper port number, because the policy server either returns a blank page in my browser, or does not respond (time out). I tried it with port numbers 443, 9443 and 1234 (learned from googling this info). And tried it with both Safari and Firefox.

What I do not understand is why the PDF's are usable without adjusting anything under Windows and Linux. Is there some kind of certificate that these platforms have by default, and that is missing from Mac OSX?