Linking to PDF drawings for download on a Wordpress page
October 2, 2019 9:09 PM   Subscribe

How do I link to/post/host PDFs for download on my Wordpress site?

Hello. I posted THIS many moons ago. I have everything figured out for the most part (not saying it is mastered!) but I cannot get one part of my project to work. I have drawn art for download with each podcast episode, but I just cannot figure out how to get the art on/connected to the page.

-It is saved in PDF format from my scanner.
-I do have a Dropbox - can I safely share links to specific documents from there without worrying about someone accessing the rest of my Dropbox files?
-Is there a better alternative?
-I tried posting on my Wordpress site media library but the documents did work - even after compressing them.

My tech ability is medium rare, as background. I can figure things out but it takes youtube videos and/or trial and error.

Thank you very much!
posted by anya32 to Technology (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Is there a reason you want the art in pdf form other than that was how you scanned it? It sounds like it would be easier to convert the art to jpg or png and display it directly on the site.
posted by bleep at 9:45 PM on October 2, 2019


Best answer: PDFs are already compressed, so unless you're reducing file size by resampling or re-encoding, you won't be doing much good. Zipping them just adds another layer of obfuscation.

Browsers can't render PDFs inline like they do with the <img> tag. The PDF files you get out of a scanner can be anything from nicely optimized to vastly bloated. As bleep said, you need these files as JPEG or PNG. While there are ways of getting the actual image data out of a PDF (I use pdftoppm) you should be able to get a fair representation out of your graphics editing program.
posted by scruss at 3:05 AM on October 3, 2019


Response by poster: Thank you both. This shows you the rareness of my medium tech skills. I had no idea and “the Google” didn’t help.
posted by anya32 at 3:44 AM on October 3, 2019


It might be easiest for you to take a partial screen capture while viewing the PDF and save that capture as an image file. They way to do that varies quite a bit depending on your operating system, but if you do a quick online search you can probably figure it out or post back here and we can help you through.
posted by exogenous at 10:28 AM on October 3, 2019


Google can only how to tell you how to do something, for figuring out what to do it's not always the best!
posted by bleep at 12:47 PM on October 3, 2019


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