By : UsefulAngle Published On Friday, September 08, 2017, 23:23 In WordPress
PDF Viewer is a responsive Wordpress plugin for embedding PDF files on a Wordpress website.
If checking compatibility with your other plugins : If you are unsure about compatibility with other plugins on your site you can do a small test by using the “Lite Version” of this plugin (Download link).
You can embed a PDF either in a Wordpress post or page or a custom post type through a shortocode. You can set the PDF to occupy the full width of your page, or embed the PDF in a size of your choice.
The rendered PDFs are responsive. On changing the screen size, PDF will be resized automatically.
You can secure your PDF so that users are forced to come to your website to see the PDF. Even if a user manages to download the PDF, he cannot open it because it is password protected.
How does that work ? You password protect the PDF, and allow the plugin to open it with a special key. The plugin uses this key to decrypt the password of the PDF, and open it. All this happens internally.
We have made a special application in our website where you can get a secure key for your PDF. Check it out here
There is a full-screen option available in the plugin, which enables the PDF to seen in full screen of the browser. The user will have no trouble in reading the PDF.
This is another viewing mode of the plugin. Normally the PDF are rendered along with menu buttons (next page, prev page etc), but through this mode the first page of the PDF is automatically extracted and placed in the page. Now when a user clicks on this image, the PDF is seen in a modal dialog (along with the menu buttons).
Checkout the demo of this mode
This is yet another mode of the plugin. This is useful in cases where you don’t want to show the full PDF explicitly. You place a normal link in your page. When a user clicks on this link, the PDF Viewer pops up in a modal dialog.
This is most useful in cases where you are “space constrained”.
Checkout the demo of this mode
You can set a theme color of your choice for the PDF Viewer. Using this, you can be sure that colors match with the rest of your website.
The user can download the PDF by a click of a button. You can even choose to hide the download button, if you don’t want the user to download the PDF.
The user can go through the PDF by clicking on a “Next Page” & “Previous Page” button. He can also use keyboard arrow keys to navigate the PDF. (top & left key to go to the previous page, down & right key to go to the next page).
As a site owner, you will like to know how the PDF is being used in the page, and whether users are actually seeing your PDF. The plugin gets you analytics data of the PDFs. You can get to know whether the user performed some action on the PDF. You can also get to know whether the user read all the pages of the PDF.
You can configure the no of seconds after which a PDF page is considered as viewed. If you set it to 2 seconds, the page will be considered as viewed if the user spends at least 2 seconds on it. The whole PDF will be considered as viewed if the user spends 2 seconds on each page of the PDF. All this analytics data you can get straight to your Google Analytics dashboard !
There is no limit on the no of PDFs that you can embed in a single post or page.
PDF Viewer is compatible with WooCommerce. It will be good if customers can see product manual, invoices etc in the store itself.
There is a “Lite Version” of this plugin, which you can download for free. You can download it here
A responsive jQuery / Javascript plugin is also available with the same features as this plugin.
Version 3.3 (24th Mar, 2018)
* PDF.JS updated to version 1.9
Version 3.1 (3rd Nov, 2017)
* Secure PDF with an encrypted key * Get analytics data, and send it to Google Analytics
Version 2.0 (9th Oct, 2017)
* Responsive * Added keyboard controls to navigate the pages of the PDF
Version 1.3 (30th Sep, 2017)
* You can now set a theme color for the PDF Viewer * Fixed navigation bar in full-screen mode * Improved icons * Three modes added to PDF Viewer : 1) Normal mode in which PDF will be rendered with navigation buttons 2) Image mode in which only the first page of PDF is shown as image. On clicking this PDF is shown as a modal 3) Inline text mode - On clicking a text, PDF is seen as a modal * Improved user interface (specially for mobiles) * CSS fixes
Version 1 (29th Aug, 2017)
* Initial release