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When I click on a PDF, it reports File type text/plain type (text/plain) is not supported

  • 7 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 13 views
  • Last reply by WestEnd

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I'm on a CentOS v6.10 machine with the latest available firefox, (firefox-60.1.0-6.el6.centos.x86_64). When I click on a PDF, it downloads it properly, but when I click on the downloads progress icon and click on the file, it reports "Unable to open document. File type text/plain type (text/plain) is not supported". The default app for PDFs is evince as it has been for years. That worked fine until the recent major update of firefox. If I set it for the standard firefox PDF viewer, the result is still the same.

I'm on a CentOS v6.10 machine with the latest available firefox, (firefox-60.1.0-6.el6.centos.x86_64). When I click on a PDF, it downloads it properly, but when I click on the downloads progress icon and click on the file, it reports "Unable to open document. File type text/plain type (text/plain) is not supported". The default app for PDFs is evince as it has been for years. That worked fine until the recent major update of firefox. If I set it for the standard firefox PDF viewer, the result is still the same.

All Replies (7)

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That is a strange message for many reasons.

If you go out to disk and rename the file with a .txt extension, then launch it in a text editor, is it actually a plain text file, or does it look like a PDF (PDF appears near the start of a PDF)?

If it is a plain text file, or an HTML file, there is some problem with the downloading process. Does this occur on all servers or is it still working normally on some sites?

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In linux (and UNIX, for that matter), we have a utility called "file" which inspects a file and reports what it looks like. On this file, it reports, "PDF document, version 1.4", It pays no attention to the file extension. Also, once I found where ff put the file, I was able to bring it up with evince or xpdf, both PDF readers. This happens on all PDF files regardless of site.

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Hmm, so different from Windows. Hopefully a Linux users recognizes this behavior.

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Thanks for trying.

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I would assume that the file isn't saved with the correct file extension (.pdf), either the file extension is missing or is wrong and Firefox defaults to text/plain.

With what file extension are the files saved?

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The files are saved properly with a .pdf extension.

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bobcatos said

The files are saved properly with a .pdf extension.

Is the original location a pdf file?