Publish Online - Linked PDF on external website won’t open

[Monsetta]

I use Publish Online for an interactive newsletter created in InDesign. All the links work as intended except one link to a PDF residing on the website of my client: all you get after clicking on that link is a blank page. I would prefer not to include this PDF directly in my newletter, just provide the link to it. Is there a special way to create the link so it would be possible to open and download that PDF? Is the PDF itself the problem (I don’t know how it was created and saved)?

[BobLevine]

Try a different browser.

[Monsetta]

Arrgh! Should have occured to me!

It turns out it works with Safari on my iPad and with Firefox on my Mac, but not with Safari on my Mac. Any workaround?

OS Sierra 10.12.6, Safari 11.0

[Diane Burns]

Can you share the link so we can check on our end?

[Monsetta]

Diane,

Here’s the link to the published document. The problem is with the yellow image on the 3rd page.

https://indd.adobe.com/view/c888a885-dfcb-4e58-abc0-ab2fe2d2fd7c

[BobLevine]

Works fine on Edge on Windows 10.

This is a browser issue and I'm not sure there's anything you can do about it.

[Diane Burns]

The links are fine on Firefox Mac and Chrome Mac. But not Safari. The browser window comes up blank. Yet the URL appears to be correct.

I tested another PDF from my own website and got the same behavior (created a file with a link to the PDF and publish via Publish Online). The browser window for the PDF opens, but is blank. If I copy/paste the URL of that blank window into a new browser window, the PDF displays correctly.

I created a PDF of the document, and the links from the PDF open the online PDF correctly, even in Safari.

So it's something between Publish Online and Safari.

Perhaps someone from the Adobe team could comment. Smells buggy to me.

[BobLevine]

If it’s a link that opens a new window, that would seem to be a PDF reader issue in Safari, no?

[Diane Burns]

But if I simply paste the PDF's URL into a new browser window in Safari, the PDF reads just fine. So Safari can read the PDF, just not when it's linking from a Pub On doc. It also can read it if the link is in a PDF, as I mentioned. Make sense? (Well, the behavior doesn't make sense, does my description?...   )

[BobLevine]

Ohhhhhhhhh.

Well, that's interesting, isn't it? But if every other browser can read the link, why can't Safari? I'm stumped but I'm still not sure where the issue is.

Perhaps there's an issue reading longish URLs as links. Maybe try a URL shortener?

[Monsetta]

Diane,

Your description make sense, but as you say the behaviour doesn’t, since it reads fine in Safari on my iPad. My vote is for a bug in the desktop version of Safari.

[BobLevine]

I’d vote that way, too. You can report it to Apple, but I doubt it’s going to be very high on their list of things to fix.

[Diane Burns]

Indeed, but I'll report it to the Adobe folks, in case there' something they can do on their end.

[javierp16336396]

Te contesto en español:

No es por el PDF ni por el servidor donde este alojado. A nosotros nos pasaba lo mismo.

¿te abre algún PDF enlazado?

Nuestra solución fue usar un visor de PDF:

GitHub - mozilla/pdf.js: PDF Reader in JavaScript

[tiffypoo_81]

I am having this issue but only in Firefox. It works fine in Chrome, Safari, and Edge.

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

Hi,

Thank you for reaching out. If it's working in other browsers, I'd recommend resetting Firefox settings and see if that resolves the issue. Let us know how it goes. 

Thanks

Rishabh