Simplest Way to Add a PDF to Your Website
Simplest Way to Add a PDF to Your Website
One of the simplest way to add PDF to a document to a Website is by using Adobe’s PDF format, which stands for Portable Document Format, This is especially true if those documents need to be printed, or if they might be overly complex, making it challenging to lay the content out appropriate for a web page.
A common example of this would be medical forms that would need to be completed prior to a new patient arriving for an office visit.
Allowing a patient to visit the website to download and print that form prior to their visit is much more efficient than having the office mail a physical copy of the form to that patient.
Using a PDF that is printed and filled out by hand is also often more desirable than collecting that information via a web form due to the possible sensitive nature of the information being collected (and the stringent security requirements your site would need to adhere to for collecting that data).
Other common uses can be:
- Detail board member meeting minutes, where you want to make the content available to readers but do not want it to be easily editable.
- Provide larger documents, like employee handbooks, that need to be readily printable (and also not easily editable).
- Showcase printed work in a designer’s portfolio.
Simplest Way to Add a PDF to Your Website
Creating the PDF is the first process. While you can purchase the professional version of Adobe Acrobat to create these documents, you can also do so from many other applications, like Microsoft Word, by using the “Print” functionality and selecting PDF as your option.
Step 2 – Upload Your PDF
Add your PDF to your web hosting environment. While some sites that use a CMS may have this functionality built in, in other instances you will simply use a standard FTP program to add those files to your web site’s directories.
Step 3 – Link to Your PDF
Now the PDF (or PDFs) is in place, you simply need to link to them. You can link to your PDF file as you would any other file – just add an anchor tag around the text or image you want to link to the PDF and enter the file path. For example, your link can look like this
- In years past, many sites would link to the Acrobat Reader Web site to help people who may not have this software to download it so they could view your file. The reality is that current web browsers will actually show PDF documents in-line. This means that they do not, by default, download them to the user’s computer, but instead show them directly in that browser. Because of this, it is not as necessary today to include the link to download the software, but if you prefer to do so, it certainly cannot hurt (it may make your site feel a bit dated, however)
- Use Acrobat files for documents you don’t want people to be able to edit by making them secure PDFs. Remember, if someone has a professional version of the software, they would be able to make edits unless you protect the document from allowing those changes. Hope this was helpful. Thanks for your Time.
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