Automatically download PDFs with Chromium?

Question

Every time I try to download a PDF document with Chromium, it asks me the following question:

This type of file can harm your computer. Do you want to keep 'file.pdf' anyway? [Discard] [Keep]

How can I get rid of this and download all *.pdf documents straightaway? Any ideas?

Answer 1

Just as I suspected, there's nothing you can do. This comes from google's (or Chromium, depending on your browser) inability to find out if the website is secure or not, which is why we get the popup on some sites but not others. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9512919/getting-around-chromes-malicious-file-warning

I know it's not the answer you're hoping for, but it is an answer indeed.

Answer 2

This old advice may still apply to the current Chromium :
After downloading a PDF successfully and it appears in the bottom bar, click the Down arrow to open up the context menu and make sure "Always open files of this type" is checked.
source

One workaround is to enable "Ask where to save each file before downloading" in the Preferences "Under the Hood" tab. It will still show the Save dialog, but just hit Enter to dismiss.
source

In general, this behavior is apparently "by design", as discussed in :
Issue 65895: Can no longer auto-open PDFs because they're considered unsafe.

A proposed solution (#57) in that issue report was :

It was suggested twice to "set the filetype to auto-open". Unfortunately, I could not find a GUI to do this. Looking into the source code, I found the relevant place in the configuration file. As a result, you can get rid of the annoying "pdf can harm your computer" warning by doing:

1. Exit chromium
2. edit ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences
3. Locate a section that looks like:
   "download": {
"directory_upgrade": true,
"extensions_to_open": "",
"prompt_for_download": false
},
4. Change the "extensions_to_open" setting from "" to "pdf". If there are already other extensions, use a colon to separate "pdf" from the existing entries (i.e. "foo:bar:pdf").
5. Save the configuration file. Now chromium should work fine and download pdf files without the "...can harm..." warning. The instructions are valid for Ubuntu Linux. Other operating systems may store the configuration file in different places.

Unfortunately, I don't have Chrome to test this suggestion, but it seems that this advice doesn't work for everybody.