Newbie - Exporting to HTML - pdf's won't open?

[Richard Perry]

OK, folks, please help me out. I'm using Access to generate an index (and
other functions) for a large collection of .pdf documents (on our local
Intranet). Since not all of my users have Access, but all have IE and Acrobat
Reader, I've been trying to generate an "index file" (actually, an Access
report) for the files in Access, then export that to html. Then to make
updates, all I have to do is generate a new report.

Everything works great except the actual links to the files. When you try to
open the file by clicking on the hyperlink, IE opens a new page,the IE URL
bar shows the correct file address, but it won't open the Adobe interface and
show the file ("inside" IE.)

I'm assuming that the URL's are good (since I can click on the hyperlink in
the table and open the .pdf's that way) and there's nothing overtly wrong
with my version of IE or the Adobe integration (.pdf's on the web open OK.) I
HAVE noticed that if I enter the file address by hand (using the URL format
"file:///C:\...") I can't get a pdf to open either. So.....

What am I missing here?(is this really an Access problem, or a html problem?)

 

[John Nurick]

Hi Richard,

If you're typing the correct URL in the IE address bar and the PDF isn't
opening, it's a problem between IE and Acrobat, probably involving the
Windows registry. (I've just tried
"file:///C:\Information\International Mail Manual.pdf"
and it worked fine on this machine.)

 

[Richard Perry]

The fault is not in ourselves, but in our stars...

I worked on this for a while longer, and here's how I wound up fixing it.
Turns out the problem wasn't IE, and wasn't Access - it was the directory
structure.

My directory titles included the following "AR's", "TC's" and so on.
Perfectly legit directory names under XP/2000. Unfortunately, IE doesn't
like them in this application.

I changed the directory names to "ARs", "TCs" etc... the system worked fine
- no problems at all.

So there you go - a wierd solution to a wierder problem!

Richard Perry

 

[John Nurick]

I don't know the details, but there are characters that are legal in
Windows file and folder names but not in URLs. The space is one, and
apostrophes could well be reserved for some sort of quoting use.

To create a URL pointing to a file with the wrong kind of name, you need
to substitute escape codes for the illegal characters. The code is %
followed by a two-digit hex number indicating the ANSI value of the
character, hence %20 for space and %27 for apostrophe.

 

[John Nurick]

Should add to my previous answer: it's much simpler not to use odd
characters in file names or folders that will also be used as URLs.