[LINK] Of PDFs & DOCs Was:[ Adobe PDF Plug-in Was [executable content vs plain data]]

David Boxall david.boxall at hunterlink.net.au
Sun Jan 20 15:54:08 AEDT 2008


On another tangent (it is a wet Sunday afternoon, after all).

A few months back, a large financial institution had a link on their 
home page to - supposedly - a pdf file.  On a Windows machine, the link 
didn't work.  A little later, I happened to be back on the site using a 
Linux box and gave the link another try.

It worked.  Turns out the "pdf file" was actually a Word doc with the 
extension changed.  Whatever the reader was in that Linux installation, 
it wasn't phased by something that had Windows totally flummoxed.

The fact that someone apparently thought that changing the file's 
extension would convert the file format gives cause to worry about the 
quality of people managing our finances, as well.

Roger Clarke wrote:
> At 12:50 +1100 20/1/08, Rick Welykochy wrote:
>> If you have the Adobe PDF Viewer installed as a plug-in, that is an
>> executable you presumably agreed to have installed in your browser.
>
> Actually, no.  Well, not in the instance that keeps annoying me.
>
> I use (among other things) Safari.
>
> I occasionally receive a PDF that Mac's Preview can't handle.
>
> By opening Adobe Acrobat 7.0 or Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0 in 
> order to view such a PDF, the software makes changes to Safari causing 
> it to install and/or activate the plug-in component within Safari.
>
> That's emphatically not what I want.  I want to download PDFs and then 
> use Preview (or other viewer) to look at them;  I do not want to 
> display PDF in my browser window.
>
> What's more, I need to open Adobe products sufficiently infrequently 
> that I can never remember where to go to get rid of the plug-in (or at 
> least suppress it firing up).
>
-- 
David Boxall                    |  In a hierarchical organization,
                                 |  the higher the level,
                                 |  the greater the confusion.
                                 |                     --Dow's Law.




More information about the Link mailing list