The user of the site, to my knowledge would have to allow activeX controls, to be accepted and run on their system. It's not really a good idea. If you are doing it for yourself, or for a business... say, an internal network or something nuts.... then you could allow access to activeX scripting, and have it use the shell method of the wscript object. If it's for people who you may not know are using the site, chances are their browser isn't going to allow activex to be run, and your links would fail for security reasons. If you have access to all these machines, you could remove the browser plugins that allow acrobate to load inside of the browser, which would make them "download" the file (or open from current location) and it would use acrobate, the external program....

Do you have access to server side scripting?

Using server side HTTP headers you can tell the browser that the file is to be downloaded instead of opened in the browser. For instance,
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=70959

When serving ANYTHING over the web, mime-types come into play. You're telling the server to tell the browser that you're serving this-type-of-file, and the browser decides, based upon the user's configuration choices, how to handle that file.

I can't think of any way you can force your users' browsers to launch Acrobat as an external application, or even, for that matter, that Acrobat Reader should open the PDF instead of Acrobat Professional or any other of the dozens of PDF parsers available that a user may have chosen instead of Reader.

You can tell the browser how you want the file handled, whether it is to be opened or downloaded (the user gets the final word on that). That alone will result in the desired behavior, the file will be downloaded and when opened it will open by the default application for that extension, be that Acrobat reader or anything else, but outside of the browser.

An alternative to that would be to use ActiveX in IE to be have access to giving the system direct orders.

Quoting myself from two other threads:
--------------------------
On the client side, your best shot is to ask your users to right click and choose save as. The other decent way is to zip your pdf file.

The only way to tell the browser to download a file, is to send HTTP headers telling it to do so. This can only be done on the server side. Do you have PHP or ASP or PERL support?

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ASP.NET:
With heavy explaining:
http://aspalliance.com/259

simple copy and paste:
http://www.tek-tips.com/gfaqs.cfm/pid/855/fid/2050


PHP:
PHP + good explanation of why's, do's and dont's
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=169198

Simple copy and paste:
http://www.ozoneasylum.com/9717

ASP:
Microsoft's ASP explanation
http://support.microsoft.com/default...NoWebContent=1

Simple copy and paste:
http://www.psacake.com/web/if.asp


Even PERL, if you will:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/fil...-script-perl/2
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From:
Prompt to Save As When Clicking a PDF
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/..._21313695.html

how to avoid playing the media file directly and open a "File Download" dialog
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/..._21073694.html



Best regards,

Esopo.