Mike’s Minute: Techstreet Enterprise Tip of the Month—FileOpen compatible PDF readers

Mike Visser

Hear from our Techstreet Enterprise Senior Product Manager, Mike Visser:

With DRM on, be sure your browser isn’t set to open PDFs by default.

For publishers with Digital Rights Management (DRM) turned on, standards users need to make sure they have FileOpen installed, and that they have a FileOpen compatible PDF reader – like Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. If they don’t, the PDFs won’t open. Sometimes, though, you might think you’ve got everything set up right – you’ve got Adobe Acrobat Reader DC installed, and you’ve taken the time to install the FileOpen plugin. But when you try to open a PDF with DRM turned on, your browser gives you an error message.

Google Chrome Error Message:

Microsoft Edge Error Message:

That’s because when your browser was installed, it took over opening and displaying PDFs on your entire computer. By default, your computer is trying to open the standards PDF you’ve downloaded with your browser – Chrome or Edge – and their PDF readers are not compatible with FileOpen. So what’s the solution? Set your default PDF reader to be a FileOpen compatible PDF reader, like Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. Adobe has simple instructions for making that change in Windows. Basically, you right click on a PDF and select Properties, and change your default PDF reader from Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, or another compatible FileOpen PDF reader. A pretty simple change to make, but not entirely obvious how to do it.

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