Opening PDFs produces a message that Acrobat or Reader must be installed but the both already are

Question

I have reports from multiple users across our school networks that they are experiencing issues when attempting to open some PDFs from any webpage or within any program. Upon opening the PDF to view it in browser they get a message saying to view the PDF they 'must have Adobe Reader or Acrobat X or later installed'. The main issue being, it is installed.

It can be a new install of either Acrobat or Reader, freshly re-installed, repaired, doesn't matter. I have reimaged multiple machines trying to fix this. It doesn't matter which browser the user is using, (tried IE, Edge, Chrome, and Firefox to no avail). The only consistent factor I have found is that it seems to happen with PDFs that have been emailed specifically, or where the PDF has been generated from an email.

The users CAN, however, download the affected PDF, then open it in Acrobat, then edit it, then re-upload it. This is our current work around, but I need an actual solution as one of the websites our staff use for student attendance and confidential notes stores the confidential notes as a PDF, and for the site to work as intended and the records to be accessible and updatable while maintaining the correct date, etc. the users really need to be able to open their PDFs in the web browser directly.

Dov Isaacs · Accepted Answer

On behalf of Adobe …

@Maddy5CCA,

Let me try to reiterate and summarize what others on this thread have told you.

The message that you are getting advising you that you need a particular version of Adobe Reader or Acrobat is the result of viewing certain PDF files in browsers or non-Adobe viewers that don't fully support the PDF file format (an ISO standard).

It isn't enough to simply download and/or install the Adobe software, but rather, you must use that software itself to open the PDF file, not the browser's own PDF viewer. Extend this to MacOS where similar issues occur with Apple's built-in Preview utility program which doesn't support the full PDF standard.

In the case of the browsers, instead of viewing the PDF file in the browser, right-click on the link to the PDF file and save the PDF file to disk and then open the downloaded PDF file from that disk location. Some browsers may ofter you the option of automatically downloading PDF files and then opening then in either Reader or Acrobat in a separate window. Regrettably, there is no workaround to this.

And yes, this is inconvenient, but this isn't caused by Adobe and nothing that Adobe can itself solve.

Note that although an Adobe logo is displayed, that logo display is directly the result of the PDF file having a special page created by Adobe for this type of situation, most often for when the PDF viewer does not support either PDF XFA forms or PDF Portfolios.

dynamic_lily0142 · Answer

Ik it has been nearly 5 years since the original post, but I have been having this same problem too for months now with PDFs saved from Outlook and finally fixed it after clicking around in the settings. Go to Outlook > Acrobat > Change Conversion Settings > toggle off "Output Adobe PDF Portfolio when creating a new PDF file" I figured if I was still dealing with this issue 5 years after this post, there are other people fighting with it too. Hope this helps!

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