I’m going to answer you in two separate comments … this first one is an answer to your email/verification question…
You can set EBD to be ‘inline’, ’email’, or ‘both’:
If ‘inline’ then when the user hits Submit on your form the page will be updated in place (via ajax) with a link to the download. There is no verification that the user has given you a good email address.
If ’email’ then when the user hits Submit on your form he will be sent an email. That email can have a link to the download file or the download file can be attached (or you could do both if you wanted). Since the user can’t get the link without getting the email you tend to get more real email addresses by using this method. Those could still be test/throwaway email addresses rather than the person’s primary email address, but there’s really no way to stop that… anyway, this way will get you more working email addresses and less made up stuff. There is no additional verification beyond getting the email with the link (or the attachment).
If ‘both’ then it does a combination of ‘inline’ and ’email’.
On the downloading of a pdf issue, it sounds like you are at least partly running into a bug that exists somewhere between EBD and Chrome’s internal PDF viewer. Depending on the setup, EBD may have trouble delivering a PDF to Chrome if Chrome tries to display it using its internal PDF viewer. At this time, no one really knows where the bug is or exactly what it happens sometimes and not other times (seems to be related to how Chrome requests parts of files [byte ranges]). Anyway, the only way to workaround that issue is to make the browser pop up the file download window rather than trying to display the PDF in the browser. It sounds like maybe that’s what you want to do anyway, so that would be good…
I’m not sure why you’re seeing missing file extensions and so forth … not sure if you were Chrome or something else. Anyway, what you should do is go to the EBD settings page in WordPress and change the “Hide / Mask” setting (if it’s checked, uncheck it … if it’s not checked, then check it). That should, hopefully, cause all browsers to get the file download popup rather than trying to display the PDF inside the browser.
If it doesn’t work or you have other issues, please post a URL so I can see what’s happening (and also tell me whether you have Hide/Mask checked or not and what shortcode you’re using)
Thank you for responding. I’ve tested several times and now it’s clear that ticking the “Hide / Mask” option causes the behavior in Chrome.
I just reread your description and realized that you said that the PDF display in Chrome. I thought you had said it doesn’t display properly in Chrome (like it displays once then never again, or it seems to get stuck and just shows the first page of the PDF or a gray screen or whatever). If you’re not seeing those problems, then you’re not encountering the Chrome PDF display bug I was describing.
Instead, it just sounds like you have Chrome which will display PDFs using its built-in viewer unless the website tells it to pop up a download window instead. Then, it sounds like maybe you have another browser like Firefox and it is not set up with a PDF plugin or not set up with one that is configured to display the PDF inside the browser. Thus, when you check or uncheck hide/mask in one case both of your browsers will pop up the download window and in the other case Chrome will display the PDF in the browser and your other browser (firefox or whatever) maybe pops up a download window because it doesn’t have a plugin configured to display the PDF internally.
So if that’s right then that’s working as it should — you probably just have one browser that isn’t configured to display PDFs. On the other hand, if Chrome is actually having trouble displaying the PDF properly (as I originally thought you had said), then ignore all this new comment as I’m off on an incorrect tangent.
