Question

I am giving link of a pdf file on my web page for download, like below

<a href='myfile.pdf'>Download Brochure</a> 

The problem is when user clicks on this link then

• If the user have installed Adobe Acrobat, then it opens the file in the same browser window in Adobe Reader.
• If the Adobe Acrobat is not installed then it pop-up to the user for Downloading the file.

But I want it always pop-up to the user for download, irrespective of ‘Adobe acrobat’ is installed or not.

Please tell me how i can do this?

Answer 1

Instead of linking to the .PDF file, instead do something like

<a href='pdf_server.php?file=pdffilename'>Download my eBook</a> 

which outputs a custom header, opens the PDF (binary safe) and prints the data to the user’s browser, then they can choose to save the PDF despite their browser settings. The pdf_server.php should look like this:

header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');  $file = $_GET['file'] .'.pdf'; header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=' . urlencode($file));    header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream'); header('Content-Type: application/download'); header('Content-Description: File Transfer');             header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($file)); flush(); // this doesn't really matter. $fp = fopen($file, 'r'); while (!feof($fp)) {     echo fread($fp, 65536);     flush(); // this is essential for large downloads }  fclose($fp);  

PS: and obviously run some sanity checks on the ‘file’ variable to prevent people from stealing your files such as don’t accept file extensions, deny slashes, add .pdf to the value