While reading a post from YourTotalSite.com about web designers not marking their PDF files, so you inadvertently click a link having to wait for the excruciatingly slow PDF plug-in to open. One of the comments recommended a Firefox plug-in called TargetAlert which will add a little icon beside all links to external documents (Word, Excel, PDF, mail, etc.). It’s a pretty handy extension.
Whenever you load a web page that has a link to a file that ends in .pdf, TargetAlert will append an Acrobat icon to the end of the link. Thus, a link that normally looks like this:
Will look like this when using TargetAlert:
Sample Link to a PDF
I even found a way to change the icons that display for certain documents. It’s a little involved…
It’s not tough, but you have to do some digging.
Find the directory for the extension on your machine. On Windows (now sure where the extensions are on Mac) it should be in: C:Documents and Settingsuser_nameApplication DataMozillaFirefoxprofilesdefault___extenstions
You may have to look around to find what directory that sepcific extension is located in. I just looked at the date installed.
In the TargetAlert extension directory there should be a chrome directory with a .jar file in it. Use winzip to extract the contents of the .jar file. You should a bunch of images in content/skin of the extracted directories. The skin directory contains all of the images for the little icons. There is a .gif and a .png for each icon. Open the ones you want changed in your favorite image app, save ’em, re-compress everything back into a .jar file (use winzip again). Bam… you’ve got customized icons for TargetAlert.
Great Find!
That is cool.