Open PDF Externally button keeps appearing

[ByteForce]

Hello Obsidian Forum.

As a student I’m working with PDF’s inside Obsidian frequently. This works well for me although I’ve noticed something rather peculiar. When I’m inside the PDF “reader mode” and I move my mouse cursor outside the designated PDF area a button with the text: “Open PDF Externally” keeps appearing even when I haven’t clicked anything to prompt such a response. I’ve linked a screenshot of what I’m talking about…
Has anyone noticed the same issue and if so how did you fix it?
Thanks.

[kyouko-tomato]

+1, Very annoying

[PKMfan69]

Another +1. Still happening on 1.5.8.

I often embed PDFs in notes, this has made this workflow useless and frustrating.

[ariehen]

I can’t seem to trigger that pop-up / button. So, for example the note looks like:

some text
more text

![[how to draw an owl.pdf]]

and even more text

and in Reading view, clicking around outside the embedded PDF area brings up the “Open PDF externally” button, is that correct?

[ByteForce]

Yes that’s correct

[mattagnello]

This has happened to me, too, on iOS. Any tap when viewing a PDF shows the “Open PDF externally” modal drawer that comes in at the bottom. It makes it so it’s actually not possible to close that tab anymore, because tapping the ellipsis menu in the upper right shows “Open PDF externally” instead of the standard menu with “Close” at the top. Added a screenshot as an example.

What the OP describes has also happened to me on desktop (macOS), but it’s not consistent. Some PDFs show the popup on hover, some I have to click somewhere first. It’s annoying either way because it makes highlighting something in the PDF either impossible or take more clicks than it should. Seems like a bug.

[Fastjur]

This is still happening to me on MacOS. Whenever a PDF is embedded and my mouse hovers over the PDF, the button appears, sometimes it keeps appearing for a couple of times making it hard to click anything else.

This is definitely annoying.

I’m using Version 1.6.5 (Installer 1.5.8)

[simpleuser]

Obsidian, please fix this, annoying indeed. please add a toggle to disable popup

[ush]

I haven’t seen anything like this although I work with PDFs frequently in Obsidian.

I have searched all over the source code of Obsidian (app.js) and also the PDF.js code, but nothing related to this was found.

Are you sure this is coming from Obsidian and not from a third party plugin?

[ByteForce]

I figured out how to disable the popup!

For me it was a community plugin called: “Image Context Menus”. In this plugin the popup is actually a feature you can turn off which is called “PDF context menu”. So I fixed it by navigating to: Settings > Community Plugins > Image Context Menus > (disable “PDF context menu”).

I hope this helps and thanks for your replies/insights.

[ariehen]

Thanks for the follow up!

I’ll share this here and on Discord. This question/issue comes up occasionally, and no one has been able to pin it down yet.