Forum Discussion
Open pdf in Browser not SharePoint pdf Viewer
Hello,
For security reasons, SharePoint prefers to open PDF files, especially with a hyperlink through SharePoint PDF viewer. Syncing the Document Library and open the PDF file from the computer may resolve this.
I know it's bothering many users but SharePoint trying to keep the environment safe.
Hope this resolve the issue 🙂
No. That can't be true. Otherwise, they would not allow the Open in Browser option at all and it wouldn't be the normal behavior when clicking on a pdf from search results or from the Document Library Web Part.
Yes I have also found this very annoying...we have a system which is fronted by a Visio diagram on the home page...the links from the visio shapes open the pdf documents in full web browser mode.
Where as the quick links web part underneath only open the pdfs in the sharepoint web viewer and we don't want our users to see version history for a start (thats for the Quality control team only) but actually more importantly the sharepoint pdf viewer displays the full A4 page in the window, and its difficult to read whereas Id prefer the full browser view as it fits the page by width and you can actually read the content.
You would that that there being a different URL for standard open and the web browser open the link should work for each type of experience. It's baffling.
Darren Graham This also has user experience implications: consider a Sharepoint communications site with links to various PDF documents. When you link to those documents using the Quick Links webpart and the site opens them using the SharePoint pdf viewer, the viewer puts its own toolbar up. One of the options on that toolbar is a "close" cross. Hitting that cross does not back you out to the page, rather it just closes the document and dumps you into the directory the PDF sits in, which the user may never even have seen before and certainly might not be familiar with.
This is very bad from a UX standpoint, and even just a URL modifier that I could manually append to each Quick Link to use the browser's own PDF viewer would be helpful.
