zabkat support forum

Since you mention Sumatra PDF in your latest blog post and I recently (last week) switched to it, I’m going to post a problem I’ve been meaning to bring up with xplorer² and PDFs. In xplorer² if I have the Preview pane on and set to the Native tab, when I select a PDF I don’t get a preview but a File Download dialog pops up asking me “Do you want to open or save this file?” and I have to dismiss it before I can move on. If PDFs are mixed in with other file types it can turn file surfing into a minefield. If I have the Preview pane set to the Draft tab I have no problem.

I’ve had this problem since the beginning of the year when I bought a new computer with Windows 10. I like Windows 10 but I better never run into the executive at Microsoft who decided Microsoft Edge their web browser should be the PDF reader. I don’t believe Sumatra PDF is ultimately the source of the problem

did you tick the option to add the shell extensions during Sumatra installation? You can run this tool to see if you have a preview handler for PDFs

nikos wrote: ↑2018 Oct 01, 04:18 did you tick the option to add the shell extensions during Sumatra installation? You can run this tool to see if you have a preview handler for PDFs

Thank you, with your help I fixed it. Since you might see more problems like mine, I thought I would tell you how I fixed it, since it the process wasn’t as completely straightforward as you would hope.

I ran CHKSHXT PDF and found NOTHING was registered for PDFs.

I reran the Sumatra installer and this time noticed the Options button and chose
Let Windows Desktop search PDF documents
Let Windows show previews of PDF documents

This gave me previews of PDFs in xplorer², but Windows complained “An app default was reset” and set my default PDF previewer back to Microsoft Edge.

I then tried to set Sumatra to the default PDF viewer by rerunning the Sumatra installer again, and from inside Sumatra with its Options and Windows wouldn’t let me. I'm just glad I didn't give up at this point.

I eventually had to go to, Start > Settings > Apps > Default apps, and got it to stick there.