[pshute]

I've had a long running issue with various Blackberry phones where certain pdf files can't be opened with the web browser. I think it's just scanned pdfs, i.e. they only contain images, not text.

I've also just had a demo of a Playbook, which has a full copy of Acrobat Reader on it. The browser still can't open them. It asks you to save them, like on the Torch. Then, unlike the Torch, if you find them and open them with Acrobat, they'll open. They display very well.

But why can't I just click on them in the browser and have them open? Like on an iPhone?

Incidentally, the Playbook looked very good, very fast. But obviously you have to test to see if they'll do exactly the things you want, or you might be disappointed by something like this that might be minor to most users, but a major obstacle for yourself.

[hrbuckley]

IIRC in the browser you can pull down the menu, go to downloads and open it there. Opening any document/data type automatically in an external handler is a dangerous thing becuase it allows a malicious or hacked web site to get executable content loaded by a handler outside the browser and maybe take advantage of an exploit. This is how the "Mac Defender" malware is getting onto Macs now.

[pshute]

Originally Posted by hrbuckley

IIRC in the browser you can pull down the menu, go to downloads and open it there. Opening any document/data type automatically in an external handler is a dangerous thing becuase it allows a malicious or hacked web site to get executable content loaded by a handler outside the browser and maybe take advantage of an exploit. This is how the "Mac Defender" malware is getting onto Macs now.

That should help find the files, but I don't buy the argument about it being like this for security reasons. Other pdf files open ok in the browser (text based ones), and the scanned ones open ok from email.

I suspect that they just forgot to support what might be a very small subset of pdf files. It might even be that it isn't scanned pdfs that are the problem, but pdfs created by particular software. In this case, the files are created by a Xerox copier/scanner. Every time I raise the topic, there's a deafening silence, so it's obvious there isn't a huge number of users who care about the problem.