310871 - Some PDFs cause error: "File does not begin with %PDF-"

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 300438

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[Jerry Askew]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7

When attempting to open some PDFs, Adobe Acrobat Reader (v7.0.3) gives the
following error:  "File does not begin with %PDF-".  This has been reported
before and may be thought to be resolved.  Read on - there's some brain-damage
going on here.  The following are my observations (not exhaustively tested
facts, but hopefully they'll help)

1.  So far, I have only seen this occur on "content-disposition: inline" PDFs.

2.  I thought I saw a correlation with instances where the URL did not have a
".pdf" extension in it (like the problem-URL), but I have now seen it happen
even if the URL ends in ".pdf"

3. *Brain damage* - All of the sudden the problem URL started working!!!  This
followed a firefox crash (100% CPU then killed via task manager).  I was able to
restore the original behavior (broken) by using the steps below.  I think this
had to do with AcroRd32 still being in memory.

4.  Tamper Data shows this PDF as having the following headers:
        Accept-Ranges=bytes
        content-disposition=inline; filename="sbdac_005157_vikingcover.pdf"
        Content-Transfer-Encoding=binary
        Vary=Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
        Content-Encoding=gzip
        Connection=close
        Transfer-Encoding=chunked
        Content-Type=application/pdf

5.  This may be related to one of these (closed) bugs 
        303931 - closed, worksforme:  Pls try my repro steps - maybe this will
expose the breakage
        300438 - resolved, fixed:  I'm unsure what version this was fixed in. 
This bug is dated July 2005 and I'm using v1.0.7, so I believe that the fix is
in my browser, yet I'm still seeing the problem.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  In firefox:  Tools | Options | Privacy --> Cahce, Clear cache
2.  Close Firefox and Adobe
3.  Open Task Manager and kill any linering instances of AcroRd32.exe and firefox.
4.  Re-open firefox and navigate to the problem URL

Actual Results:  
Got error from Adobe "File dies not begin with %PDF-"

Expected Results:  
Open the darned PDF :)

I'm rating this as major because I work in an industry that makes relatively
frequent use of PDFs.  I have recently been pushing Firefox as a superior
solution over IE.  This bug manifests itself often enough that I am loosing
converts.  We cannot let MS take over the web!!  Help me :D

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

>         300438 - resolved, fixed:  I'm unsure what version this was fixed in. 
> This bug is dated July 2005 and I'm using v1.0.7, so I believe that the fix is
> in my browser, yet I'm still seeing the problem.

All 1.0.x releases are security bugs only, no other fixes. If you want to see
that bug 300438 fixes your URL, which it does, you either need a current trunk
nightly (which you don't really want to run), or 1.5b1 (which you probably don't
want to run, unless PDFs and fresh code are more important to you than extensions).

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 300438 ***