How to disable that Adobe Illustrator overrides the “Open with”-application for PDFs it has created?

[normanius]

If I create/modify a PDF in Adobe Illustrator, my MacOS system somehow memorizes this because the file's "Open with" association was changed. Therefore, every time I re-open that PDF, it will be opened in Adobe Illustrator.

I'm not used to this behavior and consider this irritating. How can I disable this behavior and use the system's default PDF viewer to open that file, even if it was created by Adobe Illustrator?

I already ensured flat PDF export, to no avail. This feature must be new, I never observed this behavior for Illustrator v19.x.

System: Adobe Illustrator 23.0.4, MacOS 10.14

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

Your system manages the file associations.

You need to assign the application to handle PDFs via the file info dialog box (in the system)

If the system does not respect the association, then something is wrong with the database that keeps this information.

[normanius]

Hi Monika. Thanks for your response.

I was able to recover from the described problem by re-assigning the "Open with" application:

• Right click on a PDF
• Get Info
• Open with
• Preview.app
• Change all

After doing this, I was not able to reproduce my problem anymore.

When posting my issue, only the PDFs created by Illustrator were opened by Illustrator by default, the "Open-with" association of the other PDFs was not altered. Detail: I upgraded to Illustrator 23.x just before I started to observe the problem, possible that indeed the system's file database was messed up on my machine for a bit.

Anyhow, now that I was able to resolve the problem it's a bit useless to discuss it any further.

[Monika Gause]

In case this returns please do also search the Apple forums, because some system related debugging might be necessary.

Launch Services: Keep Apps and File Associations Straight