Behavior of attached PDFs

Marc Oxborrow

My preference is that attached PDFs open in a browser window, rather than being prompted to download them (as seems to be the current default).

If I choose to examine a document in more detail, or want to save it for reference, then I'll download it. But in general, my  first look at a PDF is to determine whether it's of interest. I'd prefer not to clutter my desktop with TypeDrawers attachments that don't make the cut.

James Hultquist-Todd

I agree. I’ll look into this.

Craig Eliason

Any progress on this?

James Hultquist-Todd

Sorry, I got distracted and it slipped my mind; I just put in a request.

James Hultquist-Todd

Alright, so they just got back to me (that was fast). At the moment, that functionality only works for images but they are going to pass the request on to the devs. Whether or not they do anything about it, I suppose we will have to wait and see.

Mark Simonson

It seems weird to me that it works the way it works.

If you code a page in simple HTML and include a link to a pdf, the default behavior of most browsers is to display the pdf in the browser window. The user has to do something special to cause it to be downloaded instead.

The Vanilla folks had to do something extra to override that.

Robin Mientjes

Mark Simonson said:

The Vanilla folks had to do something extra to override that.

You’re right. They added a ‘download’ attribute to the link, in fact. That part is very simple. However, if you copy-paste the address of the PDF it _also_ downloads, so I’m guessing their CDN has particular instructions to only serve PDFs as downloadable. I too wish it weren’t so.

Luke Freeman

Rob Mientjes said:

Mark Simonson said:

The Vanilla folks had to do something extra to override that.

You’re right. They added a ‘download’ attribute to the link, in fact. That part is very simple. However, if you copy-paste the address of the PDF it _also_ downloads, so I’m guessing their CDN has particular instructions to only serve PDFs as downloadable. I too wish it weren’t so.

I tried to resolve this issue by HTML inspect the element, had no luck. Seems you are right it may be down to the server.

Craig Eliason

I wonder if, now that half a year is passed, this is worth inquiring about again with the Vanilla people. It remains odd and irritating behavior.

Michael Jarboe

The two most recent threads which included PDF attachment links are both broken and will not load.

James Hultquist-Todd

I’ll send them a message and see what would be required to finally resolve this.

Hin-Tak Leung

It is the mine-type associated with the pdf being served. Octet-stream will usually result in a download. It is a server configuration in the hosting end. See

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3778.txt