External PDF highlighting with Safari browser not working!

Question

Hi,

We have been facing a weird problem with PDF documents displayed in Safari. This problem is reproducible in many of our machines. The problem is like this.. Adobe Reader has support for hit highlighting in PDF documents when it is being viewed in any browser. For example, http://www.mysite.com/myfile.pdf#xml=http%3A//www.somesite.com/words.txt This URL should highlight the words specified in words.txt file. But, unfortunately many of our Safari browsers (on Windows machines) don't highlight any text in opened pdf file. The same URL works fine in rest of the browsers (IE, Firefox and Chrome). I could not figure out where the problem is!

Can anybody please help me on this?

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

Safari uses a built-in PDF plugin exclusive to safari (even on iPhone) This is different from the Adobe's plugin and the API is different too. Most of the things that work with the Adobe plugin won't work with the one inside Safari.

you may be able to find information about forcing Safari to use the Adobe Reader plugin (Google is your friend) but that would be a per user setting, something you cannot control on everybody's machine.

I'm also looking for help on this to control pdf files inside safari using javascript.