I save pdf's with Adobe. With latest Opus version, it's changed preview pdf's to Microsoft pdf. Now pdf's don't show up in preview. How do I change it back to Adobe? Thanks
It's not something Opus changed. It's something Microsoft changed when you installed their PDF viewer.
I'm guessing you've installed MS PowerToys recently. It has a PDF viewer now, and a really bad one unfortunately (doesn't show the whole document, renders everything at a really low resolution, and doesn't paint itself properly). You can disable it in the PowerToys configuration UI. Why they even include it, I don't know, as it's so bad.
Reinstalling Adobe Reader will usually make it reassert itself as the default preview handler for PDF files in File Explorer, Opus, Outlook and anything else that uses preview handlers.
You can also override things, for Opus only, via Preferences > Viewer > Viewer Plugins, and the ActiveX + Preview + Office + Web plugin there, which acts as a bridge between preview handlers and the Opus viewer. Overrides there are saved into your Opus configuration and don't affect what happens in File Explorer or Outlook's viewers.
Good news, Microsoft have realised their PDF viewer was atrocious and are disabling it by default in new versions of PowerToys:
- We've disabled PDF preview by default, given its incompatibilities with Outlook and that Edge is now being registered for previewing PDF files on Windows 10 too.
From what that says, and my own system, they also seem to have added a working PDF preview handler to Windows which is based on Edge and seems to work well, which is good news. (Not sure what took the Edge team so long to do that, but they got there in the end. :))
Might have something to do with Edge now being 64-bit for the first time (at least on my systems).
And we all know the never ending issues with shell extensions in the wrong bitness ... So I guess they waited for that to be in sync..
Preview Handlers can be 32-bit or 64-bit without any issues (as long as they're registered correctly, which Adobe struggled with for years).
PowerToys updated to 0.57.0 with this change:
- We've disabled PDF preview by default, given its incompatibilities with Outlook and that Edge is now being registered for previewing PDF files on Windows 10 too.
However, we have to manually turn off the pdf handler as the new build keeps the previous settings. So the change I listed appears to relate to new installs of PowerToys. It is worth reading the information the developers provide in the FileExlorer Add-ons Tab.
I know, but that's theory. Reality looks differnet... For fun you could check the forums of a 32-bit file manager.
FWIW: PowerToys Run vs. preview handlers have another issue:
After uninstalling PowerToys, the preview handlers - for code related file extensions - are uninstalled, but the (HKCU) registry keys still point to the no longer registered preview handlers.
Ergo: no preview for these file extensions. Had to clean all that manually (OK, scripted, but still).
It's reality; I know because I wrote the 32/64-bit bridging code to make 32-bit preview handlers work in 64-bit Opus.
The 32-bit version of Opus could easily be made to work with 64-bit preview handlers as well (it'd just mean flipping a few statements in the code, using the same mechanism the 64-bit version uses for 32-bit PHs). But in our case it wouldn't make sense as 64-bit preview handlers don't run on 32-bit Windows, and if you're on 64-bit Windows then you'll want to run 64-bit Opus. (Same for any other software which displays the filesystem and/or talks to shell extensions.)
While 64-bit PHs in 32-bit isn't needed with a native 64-bit build, 32-bit PHs in 64-bit is important because a lot of preview handlers are still only 32-bit and people expect them to work, since they work in File Explorer. It wasn't easy to support but we did the work, many years ago now, as it's part of the spec and not really optional.
Maybe it would be too complicated for file manager developers still inexplicably using ancient, pre-.Net Visual Basic who still haven't converted to 64-bit about fifteen years after 64-bit became the norm and a basic requirement for CPUs, Windows, the filesystem, the shell, and shell extensions. But that's probably true of a lot of things.
I doubt the Microsoft of today pay much attention to third party software when deciding what to release or change. They barely pay attention to their own software these days, especially when it comes to preview handlers. Several of the preview handlers which ship with Windows have been broken in File Explorer for several years now, due to neglect and incompetence on the Windows team's part. Opus now works with more of Microsoft's preview handlers than File Explorer, which is quite strange.
Hopefully the new Edge PDF preview handler is a sign they've remembered preview handlers exist again. But it could also turn out like Microsoft's 3D Object preview handler released a few years ago, where we all (myself included) got excited, and did loads of work to make a new type of preview handler work (it registered itself in a new way, outside of the registry, as they couldn't stick to their own standards), and then Microsoft broke it about 6 months later and then abandoned it and haven't fixed it since. Sigh. Keep a copy of your old PDF viewer handy just in case, is what I'm saying.
@Leo
Thankful that I found this post. Though I don't use PowerToys the issue I got was no rendering of PDFs and DOpus hanging. And a different looking page mover at the top of the window. Funny thing Nitro was still my preferred PDF in default apps. Thanks for the references fix.