SID-02300: PDF's not displayed

Status:	Asked	TWiki version:	4.3.2	Perl version:	v5.10.1
Category:		Server OS:	RHEL 6	Last update:	8 years ago

Hello,

I have a support TWiki that has many PDF files for documentation and procedures. Any time we link directly to PDF files on our TWiki as: https://site/twiki/bin/viewfile/department/document.pdf the PDF will not load and instead we receive a pop-up message: Failed to load PDF document (Reload) and the document does not load. If I had the Adobe PDF viewer enabled I can download the PDF and it views find, but we cannot get the PDF to load in the browser (Chrome, Firefox, IE).

Has anyone had a similar issue or have any suggestions?

Thanks!

-- Vince Neal - 2017-02-20

Discussion and Answer

I don't have this issue, so this is a bit of guesswork. Your viewfile link looks strange, like a mixture of TWiki's two mechanisms to view attachments - all I get from such a link is a 403 status code ("Not found"). It should look like either of the following:

• https://site/bin/viewfile/Web/Topic?filename=document.pdf - Attachment is processed through TWiki, including MIME processing and access control
• https://site/pub/Web/Topic/document.pdf - Attachment is directly served by the webserver, bypassing TWiki completely.

For a link of the first style, check TWiki's configuration setting {MimeTypesFileName} which per default points to .../data/mime.types: This is the file which maps an attachment with extension .pdf to the MIME type application/pdf which all browsers should understand. It should contain a line like that:

application/pdf   pdf

For the second style, check the web server's configuration: Usually it does a similar thing from a platform-dependent mapping of extensions to MIME types (I'd guess /etc/mime.types for RHEL), with the same syntax.

-- Harald Jörg - 2017-03-03

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