10.1.2 Displays grey, blank page (Fixed with 10.1.3)

Hey all,

After about four hours of debugging this issue, I have found that, at least for me, the regression issue seems to be with Adobe Reader handling a gzipped PDF embedded in the IE browser, specifically. I can't speak to why this would occur, but hopefully this will help others out. On our site, we had gzipping only disabled (as most probably do) for images (gif, jpg, jpeg, png), meaning PDFs were being gzipped. This, prior to 10.1.2, worked just fine. I changed our web server configs so that PDFs are no longer gzipped and I can now view the PDFs in IE with Reader 10.1.2 the same as before.

If you're using Apache, look for a line that looks something like this in your httpd.conf:

\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

And change to:

\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|pdf)$ no-gzip dont-vary

That all being said, this still sounds like a bug in Reader 10.1.2, and gzipped PDFs via IE should be supported. I'm sending a separate report to Adobe so hopefully that specific information will help them debug / fix. Until a patch has been released, however, this will make sure our customers can view PDFs. Hope this helps someone else out!

I agree, this is a problem with 10.1.2.

When trying to view an embedded PDF statement on the Citibank Australia website I just get a grey box where PDF should be.

Solution please Adobe. When will you properly test your updates?

I suspect that the personal preferences have not been set.  I have seen this before on earlier versions of AR X.

Open Adobe Reader and answer the dialogue boxes. Then open a local file and answer the reader preferences.  Once those are answered then goto a website and try to open PDF file.

If those preferences are not answered, AR does not know how you want them to open.  In the web envirionment AR is unable to prompt the dialogue box to ask, so you end with the gray screen.

Talk about an update really messing up the enterprise. We had our systems doing auto-updates for Acrobat. Imagine every employee coming into the office on Monday not able to pull up their paystubs from the ADP website? I guess the fix is to roll back and wait (and no autoupdates....) Lesson Learned!

Here's a story of how I got this working... kind of a mystery still, but that's what we have to deal with all the time, isn't it?

I had the same problem, installing 10.1.2 caused a blank screen, or a stuck progress bar, when loading PDFs in IE9. The PDFs in question are dynamically generated with IText, embedded in html via a <object> tag, and served up via Jboss (Tomcat) 5.1.0.  There were no issues in Firefox.  We also had several users report similar issues with IE8.

What seemed to fix it (at least on my local environment) for me was to, add a Content-Length header with the file size, remove the compressableMimeType="application/pdf" in the server configuration.

However, on a different environment, it still wasn't working (grey screen, stuck progress bar in IE), so I set a debug point.  The download method was being called 3 times - I had several Cache-Control headers set in an attempt to prevent caching.  Removing these headers seemed to help, now the download method is being called only once, or sometimes twice.  I found a MS article I found that seemed relevant: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/293792

Possibly the multiple-request, user-agent='contype' thing with IE is really screwing up the new version of the plug-in.  I read the MS article, added a check for user-agent='contype' and returning only the Content-Type header instead of the whole document -- seemed to improve things.

However several PDF form elements were still screwed up - missing submit button, combo box fields with missing options.

Latest update:  This combo of configurations seems to be working on both firefox and IE9 with reader 10.1.12:

1. removed content-length, it was causing other problems

2. added check for user-agent='contype' and returning only headers

3. removed cach-control headers

4. compressableMimeType = 'application/pdf' is enabled in Tomcat config

My hunch is #2 was the real problem, would need further testing to know for sure.

Hi,

We also have the same issues with 10.1.2 when opening PDF's in the IE browser and the problem does not exist when I roll back to 10.1.1 or 10.1.0.

We use an inhouse application to open the PDF's in the browser. I now have to turn updates off on everyone's PC until a new version comes out that works.

We have the same issue with 10.1.2 while opening up the pdfs in browser (Specially IE version and working fine in Firefox, Chrome).

The same pdfs working fine on 10.1.1 reader.

We are using object tag inside jsp to embed the pdf contents and ClassId used inside object tag is

"CLSID:CA8A9780-280D-11CF-A24D-444553540000". The same code worked fine in IE, Adobe 10.1.1 combination.

For Adobe 10.1.2 and IE it's displaying the grey screen. Is the classid used is not compatable with the new version of Adobe?

New Edit --->

I have got the same problem as Joe mentioned. When i added "Content-Length" header it worked fine for me in my local.

It's not working when the same code promoted to other environments.

Something really screwed up with latest version of Adobe.

How exactly are you generating the PDF, cause Adobe Reader does not offer the capability to create PDFs.