PDF's and DIVI theme

byKC1953

556 followers

5 years ago

I wanted to put a PDF on my site for folks to be able to read and download if they liked.

After contacting DIVI Support, I leaned that I needed a plugin to do that. So, I charged ahead and bought the premium version of PDF Premium Embedder, installed it, and set about the task of embedding and such.

Well, it would the plugin would embed a link but not the document itself. Grrrr. Not what I was after.

So off goes a letter to the support folks at Lever Technologies to see what the issue might be? Turns out, I learned 24 hours later, that with the DIVI theme at least, there's not an issue really, but a different way you have to go about getting the plugin to function as advertised.

I thought I would share that info with any other DIVI-ites that might want to know.

When you upload the PDF from the media library into a module, take a look at it with the text screen, not the visual screen. That's so you'll see the code and this is where you have to make a modification in order for the PDF to display on your site.

This is the jist of the email I received:

If you are using the Divi editor, you won't see a PDF Embedder block or the automatically rendered shortcode like you would it you were using the WP 5 Gutenberg editor in conjunction with the Divi theme. This is because the Divi page builder over-rides the normal content creation process and breaks the automatic shortcode insertion process.

When using Divi, you will need to update the inserted link so that it is rendered as the shortcode. It is easier to do this in the TEXT tab of the visual editor. Change the inserted code
from:
<a href="link-to-pdf">Text</a>
to:
[pdf-embedder url="link-to-pdf"]

No being a coder myself, this was an interesting learning exercise but I did eventually manage to get it to work. It's all spiffy now and I kind of sort of know now how to make PDF documents available on my webpage.

She also added:

I have also put together a JSON layout template for the PDF Embedder plugin. You can import this into your layouts. When you insert the layout into the page, you will initially see an error message—this is because the url="" attribute is empty. You will need to open the media gallery, select your PDF, then copy and paste the file URL into that empty attribute.

Now personally, I have no idea what JSON is other than the name Jason mispelled, but I'll give that one a go next.

Hope that's something DIVI-ites can make use of.

For everyone else, the WP PDF Embedder Plugin is is a great tool and doesn't require you to do any of the above...or so I was told.

Cheers,

KC