Using Adobe Acrobat to view PDF’s in Safari 5.1.x and Mac OS X 10.6.8

Safari no longer displays PDF files.. and hasn’t done so on my machine for months. It does not bother me much, as I prefer to download them anyway, by clicking in the URL bar and then holding option and then hitting return, which downloads them.

But a client called and complained that they needed to be able to fill in online pdf forms, and when they clicked the link all they got was a black screen, so I went and figured it out:

On Mac OS X 10.6.8 with up to date versions of Safari, you need to make sure that Safari is running in 64 bit mode for the Acrobat reader plugin to work.

To get it to do so, quit Safari, go to it in your applications folder, right click on Safari and Get Info. Empty the checkbox that says “Open in 32 bit mode”. Launch Safari, and viewing PDF’s in Safari with Acrobat Reader will now work.

You can also run into problems if you have Acrobat Reader and Acrobat Pro installed, any updates to the Pro version may mess up your browser plugins. To fix this you need to delete the plugins and reinstall Acrobat Reader.

The AdobePDFViewer plug-in is used to display PDF files in Safari using Acrobat and Reader. This plug-in is installed as part of the Acrobat X or Reader X installation. The location of this plug-in is:

Macintosh HD/Library/Internet Plug-ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin

Details are from Adobe’s Help page: Troubleshoot Safari Plug-in

To remove the plugin: Quit Safari, then go and delete the plugin. Yes there’s a second one, called AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin, you can ignore it.

Then reinstall the latest version of Acrobat reader. You can find various installers on Adobe’s Acrobat Reader Download Page.

I should also mention: if you have need to use Acrobat Reader to view PDF’s in Safari and would prefer to use the built in viewer, just go and delete both the plugins mentioned above and then restart Safari.

How to mount the Windows partition of a hybrid DVD

A client of mine has an older Lenovo laptop with a defective DVD drive. He’s saving for a MacBook Air rather than spend money fixing it! I downloaded the installer for his new Fujitsu ScanSnap so he could get up and running right away. But the DVD has goodies that you can not download, so I offered to bring it back home and copy the installers to a USB stick. When I put the DVD in I only get the Mac partition. So here’s how I worked around it:

You need to have a mount point for the Windows partition, on the Mac one gets created in /Volumes when you mount something, we need to make one, so pop open your Terminal and do:

mkdir /Volumes/windows

This creates a directory named “windows”. You can name it whatever you want.

Now you need to find the device name of the DVD:

diskutil list

and, since the DVD is in the drive, you’ll see it come up as a device, and some partitions. In my case it was:

/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_partition_scheme *3.3 GB disk1
1: Apple_partition_map 17.9 KB disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS ScanSnap 943.7 MB disk1s2

To mount the Windows side of the CD:

sudo mount -t cd9660 -r /dev/disk1 /Volumes/windows

sudo to prove we are an admin (SuperUser DO), and the mount command with options to mount 9660 format, the device and the path to mount it at.

It showed up as expected, and then I copied the installers I needed. You can try dismounting it in the Finder, but that will not work, you need to unmount it like this:

sudo umount /Volumes/windows

Note that it is umount not un-mount.

Then go and delete the directory, in the Finder or on the command line:

rmdir /Volumes/windows

After that, you can eject the CD normally, or if you tried from the Finder and can no longer see it, do it from the command line:

diskutil eject /dev/disk1

No I did not figure this all out on my own, I used an article from the codeweavers support wiki. Thanks!