[thelist] Acrobat detection

Ben Gustafson ben_gustafson at lionbridge.com
Tue Dec 18 09:34:00 CST 2001


Chris,

I think detecting the Acrobat plugin in IE is problematic. I came across an interesing
article at <http://www.infinitemonkeys.ws/infinitemonkeys/articles/VBScript/997.asp> which
describes how to use the Microsoft OLE Viewer to find the ProgID of objects you'd like to
detect on a visitor's machine via the browser. For Acrobat, it looks like ProgID is
"PDF.PdfCtrl". 

I haven't tried it out, but maybe you could let us know if it works!

For Netscape only, you could try:
--
function hasPDF()
{
	return (navigator.mimeTypes && 
		navigator.mimeTypes["application/pdf"] &&
		navigator.mimeTypes["application/pdf"].enabledPlugin)
}
--

--Ben
  Lionbridge Technologies
  www.lionbridge.com

> I've run into a situation at work where I need to detect for 
> the acrobat pdf
> plugin/control.  I found a couple resources, namely 
> BrowserHawk and XAgent,
> however browserhawk isn't an option for us and XAgent doesn't 
> run well on
> our servers for some reason (EXTREMELY slow).  Both are 
> slightly overkill
> for this situation anyhow...
> 
> So I was wondering if anyone had a bit of JS that would detect this
> plugin/control.  Any help, urls, code, etc. would be most 
> appreciated. ;)
> 
> TIA!
> 
> Chris Blessing
> webguy at mail.rit.edu
> http://www.330i.net




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