This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

PDF does not display correctly

  • 5 replies
  • 20 have this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

Issue: One of our website page displays a PDF form filled with data retrieved from database. The PDF file displays perfect in IE browser, but the PDF form was blank in Firefox browser - can not see the filled data at all in Firefox browser nor in print-out from Firefox.

I installed the most recent version of Firefox PDF viewer 0.8.1 add-on, and played with different options under the menu "options/Portable Document Format (PDF), but no luck to solve the above issue.

I noticed that not only our website, but also some government websites have the same issue display data filled PDF.

Anybody can help me out to resolve this issue?

Many thanks!

Issue: One of our website page displays a PDF form filled with data retrieved from database. The PDF file displays perfect in IE browser, but the PDF form was blank in Firefox browser - can not see the filled data at all in Firefox browser nor in print-out from Firefox. I installed the most recent version of Firefox PDF viewer 0.8.1 add-on, and played with different options under the menu "options/Portable Document Format (PDF), but no luck to solve the above issue. I noticed that not only our website, but also some government websites have the same issue display data filled PDF. Anybody can help me out to resolve this issue? Many thanks!

All Replies (5)

more options

This may well be a limitation of the JavaScript-based PDF Viewer. It currently does not support all the feature of the Adobe plugin (or stand-alone version of Adobe Reader). You can test that theory using the steps in this article: View PDF files using Firefox’s built-in viewer.

While an end user can switch around among viewers by changing their Firefox options, unfortunately there currently is no way for websites to detect which viewer is in use and assist visitors in a personalized manner. I think for now you may need to recommend that Firefox users use the above article for assistance if more complex PDFs do not render as expected.

more options

Thanks for your advice.

I tried by following the steps of the article "How to disable the built-in PDF viewer and use another viewer", but still does not work.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

more options

Could you clarify what you mean by "still does not work" -- does the PDF still load in the native Firefox viewer, or does the form load in the Adobe plugin and the fields still are not populated? For the second problem, it's hard to know what might be happening there without hands-on access to a problem PDF.

more options

By the way, there are some security updates for the Adobe Reader 10.1.x series, and corresponding browser plugin. Try using Help > Check for Updates from within Adobe Reader to install those. I think 10.1.7 is the latest in the series.

more options

You can set the pdfjs.disabled pref to true on the about:config page to disable the build-in PDF viewer.

You can check the value of the plugin.disable_full_page_plugin_for_types pref on the about:config page and remove the application/pdf part if present or reset the pref to the default via the right-click context menu.

See also: