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Submission details

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No preview picture of PDFs in Explorer.

Submitted by maxico86 on June 11, 2008 to Usability

In Explorer, the XPS documents have an preview picture. PDFs had this also in Windows XP Explorer. But in Windows Vista, there is no preview picture of PDFs. Why?

Show preview pictures of PDFs in Windows Vista Explorer, like it was in Windows XP Explorer.

Medium

Medium

Not fixed

Discussion (10 comments)

alrico88 wrote on June 11, 2008, 8:51am

Check your Adobe setup, because it really works. I have tried it in 3 computers and all of them show the preview of the PDF by default.

xiphi wrote on June 11, 2008, 8:56am

Shows previews on mine.

maxico86 wrote on June 11, 2008, 8:59am

I haven't found a option to enable it. Why is it not automatically enabled? Or is it a bug on the german version?

G-Z wrote on June 11, 2008, 10:03am

I had that problem too. Sometimes previews are shown, sometimes not. Try to play around with different views or reinstall the adobe reader.
But anyway: I think previews should be enabled for all kinds of documents not just for a few.

WillHughes wrote on June 11, 2008, 12:51pm

It is the responsibility of the creator of the document type (eg: Adobe for Acrobat and Illustrator documents) to provide preview handlers.

Michael Mc wrote on June 11, 2008, 1:03pm

Documents with usage restrictions on them don't always show previews for me.

irv4oh wrote on June 11, 2008, 1:39pm

Adobe Reader must be installed for this to work, but as a common file type it really should be built-in.

Turbo wrote on June 11, 2008, 2:13pm

Previews are provided by the applications themselves, not by the OS. This is, at best, a bug with Acrobat Reader.

While I'd love Windows to have a built-in PDF Reader, that's not likely to happen. Adobe's lawyers would cry 'antitrust'.

.Chris wrote on June 20, 2008, 2:59am

looks like an older adobe reader verson. upgrade to the latest

aakash wrote on August 17, 2008, 11:30am

Actually, it is possible that maxico86 has the latest version of the Adobe Reader. However, maxico86 may be using Vista x64. Unfortunately, Adobe does not support the preview functionality in Vista x64 yet (I have this same problem on my Vista x64 installation). So, this is an Adobe issue, not a Windows issue.

maxico86: If you are using Vista x64, then download the Foxit PDF Preview Handler created by Tim Heuer:
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/05/09/foxit-pdf-preview-handler.aspx

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