A Consuming Experience

If like some people you install the free Nuance PDF reader, then uninstall it but it's still taking over PDFs in Firefox, here is how I got rid of it. It worked for me, but your mileage may vary.

Try these steps (screenshots are from Firefox 4):

1. In Firefox find your Plugins - in Firefox go to menu Tools, Add-ons (or in the address bar type about:addons and hit Enter), then on the left click Plugins
2. In the Plugins list, look for all PDF plugins that are NOT "Adobe Acrobat" - in my case the culprit was DocuCom PDF Plus rather than Nuance, go figure. Click the Disable button for that plugin, so that it now gets greyed out and has "(disable)" after its name:
   
   
   
3. Do this for each non-Adobe PDF plugin. Make sure you scroll down to the end of the plugins list to disable all non-Adobe PDF plugins.
4. You may also have to disable and then enable the standard Adobe plugin, again go figure but I had to before it would work.
5. Restart Firefox, just for luck. And hopefully now PDFs will open using Adobe Reader instead of Nuance.

Nuance PDF Reader

Why did I decide against Nuance's free PDF reader? I want to make it clear that I do love their Dragon Dictation app for the iPhone, which is remarkably accurate and quick (and, generously, free).

However, their PDF reader, although it's quite fast, insists on defaulting to the hand tool when I open a PDF, whereas I need it to default to Select to copy/paste text etc.

More importantly, when I rightclick on a PDF in Firefox, Nuance won't show me the document Properties, which I need in order to check the publication date of some PDFs.

There may be a way to change its settings to do what I need, but it's not obvious, and I've not had the time to find it - whereas Adobe defaults to what I need, so I may as well go back to that.

Labels: PDF, tip, tips, troubleshooting

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