My Web team and I are discussing whether or not we should open links to
PDFs and other non-html pages in a new window.
a big "no" from me
not in a new window, or ANY browser window.
Acrobat Reader can take a long time to start on some machines.
It can be extremely annoying for users to be forced to wait a long time for
a plugin to start (with the browser locked up in the meantime) -
especially if they clicked on the link assuming it was a normal link to
another page!
I would simply provide links clearly marked as pdf so the user can download
them and open them with a standalone reader.
Someone cited Jakob Nielsen's argument at
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/open_new_windows.html as the reason we should
open in a new window. (We all work on government Web sites and they are
about >to release a new set of linking standards.)
There are a lot of people out there with very old machines and old versions
of acrobat reader and it is not a good idea to risk leaving people sitting
there waiting for so long with an unresponsive browser that they might think
their browser has "crashed"!
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