PDF viewer zoom buttons

Hi there,

I am a new user. Up until about an hour ago, whenever I viewed a PDF file in the viewer, I was able to zoom it and select text. Now all those little icons at the top of the viewer pane are greyed out, except for the "Next/Previous" arrows. I installed Acrobat Reader and then Acrobat DC in the hope it would solve the issue, but it has not. If I go into Preferences/Plugins/ActiveX+Preview+Office+Web and then hit "Configure" a list of Viewers opens which includes "Adobe PDF for Vista (32 bit)". There are a number of other viewers as well. But if I uncheck the Adobe viewer, none of the others is used instead, I get an error screen, and cannot even view a PDF in the viewer.

How do I fix this, please?

Dr. Dave

PDF viewers usually have their own zoom buttons within the viewer itself or sometimes via the right-click menu in the viewer (if they allow you to zoom at all).

The buttons in the frame that are part of Opus usually get disabled as, if I remember correctly, there isn’t a way for us to hook them up. Zoom controls are not part of the Preview Handler API which they use, which was designed for Outlook and File Explorer.

Those buttons work with Opus’s built-in viewers and some Opus viewer plugins, and some ActiveX controls (e.g. Internet Explorer) but probably not with Preview Handlers. Are you sure it wasn’t a different type of file when you saw them enabled?

Yes, I am positive. I was using it for several days since installation, then it just went south.

At this time, there is no right-click context menu. There is a scroll bar if it is a multipage document. I have used the "upload" button above to attach a marked-up screen shot of the viewer pane window FYI.

One of the bottom buttons opens a full screen preview (screen shot also uploaded) which appears to be intended for bitmaps, though it is labelled "Adobe PDF for Vista (32 bit)".

With great respect, Leo, I need to get this up and running properly ASAP as I am pushing up against a publication deadline. Surely, there must be a more current plugin viewer than a deprecated, legacy "Adobe PDF for Vista (32 bit)" viewer. Can you please provide a procedure for upgrading this to a fully functional viewer that actually works in 2022?

Thanks :)))
Dr. Dave

Here is the marked-up screenshot of the viewer pane.

It's possible you were using a different PDF viewer previously. Different PDF software often fights over the filetype/registry settings and takes control of them when it is updated, with the last installed/updated software winning.

Try a different PDF viewer if the one you're using has no zoom options within it. Installing it is usually enough to make it become the new default, as long as it includes a preview handler.

You should see exactly the same thing if you use File Explorer's viewer pane with the same document. It'll be the same viewer. None of the details of any given PDF viewer are specific to Opus. We can only really help if you see something different in Opus compared to Explorer. (If that's the case, try resetting the ActiveX+Preview+Office+Web plugin's configuration first, in case it has been explicitly told to use or not use a particular preview handler for PDF files.)

Windows 10 and 11 also have a built-in PDF preview handler these days, which could be the one you were using before. It should be in the list under "Microsoft PDF". Although, when I check two Win10 machines now, one of them is missing it today. So it's possible a recent Windows Update broke that viewer. (Microsoft have a long history of breaking their own preview handlers and taking a while to fix them. But it could equally be some other PDF software registering itself over the top of the other viewer.)

I am not sure, but try PDF X-Change.

Sounds like a good clue to me. Windows 10 did just get a Patch Tuesday update unless one has it blocked or delayed or something.

OK. Did a system restore to time before last update and full functionality of the PDF viewer was restored! Good guess, Leo :)))

PS. FYI I did scr


eenshots of the "ActiveX..." configure page before and after the system restore. There are differences. I have attached screenshots of both before and after. Hopefully, these may help you prevent this in the future.

Dr. Dave

The differences seem to be, in the first image:

  • PDF-ShellTools is not present
  • .pdf is assigned to Adobe PDF for Vista

In the second image:

  • PDF-ShellTools is present, and .pdf is assigned to it
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