All of the sudden Preview will not open pdfs with the file extension ".pdf". It opens those without it.
Suggestions?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.1
If you Get Info on a PDF that doesn't open, what app is set to open the file?
UPDATE
I uninstalled Maestral and reinstalled the Dropbox app and that "fixed it". Don't ask me why. Thanks for the replies.
Try booting to Safe Mode. That boot up takes minutes and clears caches and other things that may resolve your problem.
How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support
A lot of times just boot to Safe Mode followed by normal boot resolves problems.
I can randomly choose any PDF on Monterey 12.1 and open it in Preview. Doesn't matter if it was produced by Pages v11.2, or Pages 5.6, or any number of other PDF generation tools.
The Finder can hide (but not remove) the PDF extension and Preview will still open the PDF because the extension (even though its display is hidden) is still on it, and the operating system understands that it is truly a PDF document.
Pages v11.2 on Monterey 12.1 appends the .pdf extension to documents exported as PDF, or as Print > PDF > Save as PDF. The operating system knows these are PDF, and so does Preview. The latter will also open Pages (.pages) documents. Much older versions of Pages used to export as PDF with a hidden .pdf extension, but they were still known to the operating system and Preview as PDF documents and opened appropriately.
If you literally strip the .pdf extension from the file, then the operating system doesn't know what it is, the default opening application becomes TextEdit (displays gibberish), and it can only be forced open in Preview from either the Other category in the Open With sub-menu by deliberately selecting Preview from the Applications folder, or in the Terminal as follows for the file foo:
open -a Preview foo
Never manually remove filename extensions.
Have you installed and run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus or VPN apps on your Mac?
Preview. I downloaded PDF Reader Pro Lite and am having the same problem with it now. Even if I remove the extension from the file it does not open. This is files I have created from Pages docs and also from files downloaded from the internet, etc.
No joy. Issue occurred in safe mode and continues after restart to normal mode. Size of file does not matter, btw.
I did install Maestral for Dropbox yesterday, that is the most recent install. This is not only happening to pdfs stored in Dropbox (some of which are on the local drive, some in the cloud).
The previous poster is asking about and see picture below. Notice the " Open With " below Comments
Thanks, already answered: Preview is the default app to open pdfs.
Preview will not open pdfs with extension .pdf
