[17699] in Athena Bugs
Re: sgi 8.3.17: netscape/acroread
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Thu Mar 23 21:41:38 2000
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 21:41:34 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200003240241.VAA23328@speaker-for-the-dead.mit.edu>
To: Dan Winship <danw@mit.edu>
CC: bugs@mit.edu
In-reply-to: "[17260] in Athena Bugs"
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
In october you said:
What were you trying to do?
Help a user print a PDF file from the web.
(specifically
http://www.ai.mit.edu/courses/6.891/Lectures/Lecture8.pdf)
What's wrong:
Netscape thinks a lot and appears to be starting acroread, but
then it says "Document done", but is showing an empty page
(blank, gray, no acroread plugin display).
What should have happened:
It should work.
Here's our current stock reply on this:
The acroread plugin is extremely unreliable on all Unix platforms; at
the moment, our only solution is to have people use the helper app
approach instead of the plugin. While the helper app occasionally has
problems too, it seems to be much better than the plugin.
In other words, in your Netscape preferences, your handler for the PDF
file type should not be nppdf.so; instead that setting should point to
an application. The path should be
/mit/acro/arch/@sys/bin/acroread %s
This is the setting used in the global mailcap and mime.types files,
but you may have local, private copies which have different
settings. If you need further details, send me an email. In the mean
time, I'm going to close your bug report.
--
Jonathon
