Did anyone ever resolve the IE8 PDF link issue?

Feb 17, 2012

Andrew Dunn
By Andrew Dunn

There's been some back-and-forth on these forums regarding an issue with Articulate Presenter, IE8 and Adobe Reader. If I have a link to a PDF document, with an absolute path (http://www.mydomain.com/document.pdf/), when I click on the link in the published presenter file in IE8, a popup briefly appears and closes, and the PDF file is not opened. I can sometimes open the file via CTRL+Click, but not always.

I've seen suggestions on here regarding changing IE options, Adobe Reader options etc, but none work. My users are stuck with IE8, so asking them to use FF is not an option.

I've also seen on here that users have not had the same problem when creating absolute path links to PDFs in e.g. Captivate, which makes me wonder if this is an issue with Presenter.

Right now I'm stuck with a load of legacy courses that won't open PDFs in IE8 (our new organization-wide browser of 'choice'). Aside from recommending that I make all these PDFs into attachments (they change regularly, and need to be external links), or that I create some workaround html file (inelegant and time-consuming), has anyone at Articulate got any suggestions? Or anyone else, for that matter? This seems to be an issue particular to Presenter (a link in a quizmaker file, embedded in presenter, works fine).

3 Replies
Justin Wilcox
12 years ago02/17/12 at 12:27 pm (UTC)

Hi Andrew.

I understand the difficulty here but there really isn't another way around this issue that I am aware of. If you have a web page online that links to your resources, which shouldn't be too difficult to make) and point to that, that will work which would allow you to keep them separate from your content so that they can be updated without having to update your content. If you were to create a web page with links, I prefer to use something like Notepad++ which is designed to edit HTML.

Andrew Dunn
12 years ago02/17/12 at 12:38 pm (UTC)

Hi Justin

I'm pretty comfortable with the coding side of things (I'm a developer - I favour TextPad for hand-coding html). That's not the roadblock.

I don't want to create an HTML page that resides locally, or an HTML page on a web server that has links to each and every downloadable PDF in my courses. I guess I could create an individual HTML page with a redirect for every PDF, so that the user experiences a popup window. Not a great solution.

I haven't seen a satisfactory reply from Articulate as to why this is a particular issue with AP. If Captivate can handle linking to PDFs in IE8 (http://www.articulate.com/forums/articulate-presenter/10839-hyperlinks-pdfs-not-working-internet-explorer-4.html), then it looks like this is an issue with AP that Articulate needs to resolve.

Joanne Lazzaro
almost 12 years ago05/11/12 at 5:02 pm (UTC)

I just found this thread after struggling with the same issue for several weeks. I though I just had corrupted files...

So, has the issue been resolved (or has anyone tested?) relative to IE 9?

I kinda need to know before I start campaiging for a company-wide (or user-by-user as needed) upgrade to our default IE8 browser-

Joanne

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