Comment 20 for bug 1981163

Revision history for this message
In , 9-henry (9-henry) wrote :

(In reply to BOB from comment #10)
> 91.3.1 I don't use Firefox my system is Windows 10. I still can't open a pdf when composing an email to check contents. Never had that issue in prior versions.

The current problem is that, when opening the PDF attachment from the compose window, it is opened *as if* it is a HTML file. So whatever "Action" is set for "HTML documents" in preferences will be used.

This should be fixed in thunderbird, but if you need a work around to be able to view the pdf for the time being, go to Preferences -> General -> Files & Attachments and either:

1. If you have version 91.3.1 or later, set Content Type "PDF" to "Preview in Thunderbird" (this way of opening pdfs was fixed in bug 1734428).
2. Set Content Type "HTML document" to an application that can handle both PDF and HTML documents. A web browser can normally do so.
3. Set Content Type "HTML document" to "Always Ask". And when the asking prompt pops up you can manually *find* and select the pdf reader each time. This way if you open an actual HTML document, you can select the correct application as well. This requires more manual work to re-find the pdf reader each time, but I think this is the safer option if you don't use option 1 or 2.
4. Set Content Type "HTML document" to your preferred pdf reader. But I would **not** recommend this because this will mean you would fail to open *actual* HTML documents (thunderbird will attempt to open them in your pdf reader, which will likely not handle HTML). But even if you never open HTML documents at the moment, when you eventually get one (e.g. as an attachment in your inbox) you'll run into this problem but there's a good chance that you won't remember that you set up this work around.

NOTE as well, if you change any of these options this will also effect how you open files in other parts of thunderbird. Specifically, it will change how you open PDF or HTML attachments in your inbox, etc.

I think the work around in comment 8 is basically using Firefox as an intermediate application, with the idea that Firefox can handle both HTML and PDF, but if it receives a PDF type it can redirect to open it elsewhere. But this doesn't solve the problem in Thunderbird and requires keeping Firefox configured in this way.