XYplorer Beta Club

Preview on hover works very nicely in the latest version (19.0), except for pdfs, which give a "Cannot decode" message.

Is this related to the application associated with pdf files in Windows?

It is related to the installed preview handler

Read e.g. this: https://www.xyplorer.com/faq-topic.php?id=PDFthumbs
to know which PDF application to install to remedy this "problem"

Thanks, but "show thumbnails for non-images" is already ticked, and Sumatra is already installed and is the default pdf handler.

Do you get thumbnails for those PDFs?

It's not (necessarily?) related to the default application in Windows 10.

I use this silly Metro app which is also a comic book reader for my own default (btw, comic book format - essentially a non-compressed zip file of JPGs or whatever with the extension changed to CBZ - is a very handy little format if you don't feel like making a PDF file, but don't like having a bunch of pictures lying around separately, for example rarely used album art - if it's a libretto or something, I'll bother to make a PDF; it's also nice to be able to quickly unzip it). I've got Sumatra installed, but I just installed to try out PDFXChange PDF Viewer, and I found it to be very, very fast for previews and trouble free for XY previews on my WIn10 machine. I didn't do anything but install the thing with minimal options.

(I also have Acrobat Pro installed, but it's not a default for anything.)

I don't do thumbnails myself.

Well, not sure whether I'm getting an thumbnail or a generic icon. It looks rather generic with "PDF" in yellow. Same sort of display for Word and Excel files - looks like the same icon for all files, with a blue W or a green XLS.

So maybe something else is wrong with the set up. But hover works fine with Word and Excel files, so I'm a little confused.

Maybe I just try installing PDFXChange PDF Viewer ?

Removing the Adobe reader and installing the PDFXChange PDF Editor (the Viewer seems to have been replaced by the Editor) seems to have fixed the hover problem, even without switching from Sumatra as the default viewer.

Thanks for the suggestions.

If you have any problems in life, removing Adobe should always be the first thing to try. It just makes everything better.