I’ve been working on a project lately where
I have to download a lot of PDFs from a website and then go through
them and highlight text, add comments, etc. In Google Chrome, whenever I
click on a link to a PDF file, it just opens the file inside the
browser window.
This is pretty convenient for most people and it was fine for me until I
started this project. Other than viewing the PDF file, you really can’t
do anything else with the file if it’s opened in Chrome. So basically, I
was clicking on the save button, saving it to the hard drive and then
opening it from there. After a while, this started to become a little
annoying and time consuming.
I was using Adobe Acrobat on my Mac to make the edits to the PDF files,
so I wanted to use that instead of Chrome. Finally, after playing around
with stuff for a while, I managed to figure out a good solution. In
order to prevent Chrome from opening the PDF files, I had to disable the
Chrome PDF Viewer. Here’s how you can do it. Open Chrome and paste the following into the address bar:
chrome://plugins/Now find Chrome PDF Viewer and click on the Disable link.
Now when you click on the file, it will automatically open in the default application set for opening PDF files on your machine. Note that in addition to disabling Chrome PDF Viewer, you might also have to disable Adobe PDF Viewer in the Chrome plug-ins section. When you install Adobe Acrobat, it also installs a PDF viewer in Chrome too, so if you want to open the PDF files in the desktop Adobe program, you’ll need to disable all PDF viewers that are Chrome plug-ins.
In addition, you may have to change the default program for opening PDF files on your computer. For example, on my Mac, the PDF files were opening in Preview rather than Adobe Acrobat. To change the PDF viewer on a Mac, you have to right-click on a PDF file and choose Get Info.
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