Adobe PDF Grey Screen in IE 11

2
votes

(I know, it's 2019, why is anyone still using IE? Because we still use the Acrobat PDF plugin.)

I have a web application which (among many other things) uses the Acrobat plugin to display a PDF file inside a popup window (to be digitally signed).

We have an issue where the first time someone accesses the PDF-to-be-signed, all that is displayed is the Adobe Grey Screen of Death. If we close the popup and redisplay, the PDF displays.

I've tried the following steps to fix the issues:

  • Checking "Display Large Images" in Acrobat

  • Modifying response headers to the following:

    Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 (removing no-cache does not help)

    Pragma: private

    Expires: 0

I've also tried to activate error logging in Acrobat under Action Wizard, but nothing is generated.

Eventually, someone will rewrite this to work in a modern browser (which can't be done now), but for now, can anyone assist?

5
javainternet-exploreracrobat
you can try to refer this link may help to solve your issue. Ref: helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/cant-view-pdf-web.html It will be better if you use HTML 5 code to display PDF content on web page. – Deepak-MSFT
I am unable to switch to HTML 5 code. I used a rather ugly workaround to pre-initialize the Acrobat plugin on user login so that by the time the user gets to the part of the application which uses it, the plugin is ready to go. – Jason
If your work around is able to solve the issue than I suggest you to post your solution as an answer and try to mark your own answer as an accepted answer for this question after 48 hrs, when it is available to mark. It can help other community members in future in similar kind of issues. Thanks for your understanding. – Deepak-MSFT
Deepak-MSFT: I'm actually kind of embarrassed by the ugliness of the solution and shocked it worked, which is why I didn't post it. – Jason

5 Answers

3
votes

I've found a solution which worked in my case. I disabled the “Run in AppContainer” feature in the Adobe Reader Enhanced Security settings: Disabling "Run in AppContainer"

2
votes

I had the same issue for IE11, which was resolved by removing the Cache-Control header completely.

Specifically, I removed:

Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0

Adding any one of those options back in with the Cache-Control header caused the issue described.

2
votes

We had the same problem. Solution that works like a charm: Setting header cache-control to no-cache worked fine.

0
votes

Okay, coming back around to this. My original solution, which I thought worked, did not.

What seems to have been happening was that the code to load the PDF was actually being made twice, in quick succession (coding error). The Acrobat ActiveX plugin was not finished initializing to respond to the first load request, and having a second document thrown at it like that seems to have crashed the plugin, hence the grey screen.

Tracking the second load and removing it resolved the error.

0
votes

We were experiecing this problem also. For us, we got the grey screen when the response headers had:

Cache-Control: public, max-age=0, s-maxage=0
Date: ...
Expires: ...
Vary: *

And was solved when we changed the response headers to:

Cache-Control: public, no-store, max-age=0, s-maxage=0
Date: ...
Expires: ...
Vary: *

Note that we are using C# so our actual solution might be a bit different. We used this attribute on our action method:

[OutputCache(Duration = 0, NoStore = true)]