Support » Plugin: WordPress Shortcodes Plugin — Shortcodes Ultimate » Displaying Documents has become unreliable

Displaying Documents has become unreliable

  • Resolved MikepFive

    (@mikepfive)


    1 year, 12 months ago

    Hi,

    1st, I’ve been successfully using this plugin on several sites for several years. It’s been a Huge Benefit. Many Many Thanks……

    Recently, I’ve been having problems with the document shortcode on one particular site that has several that display pdf documents.

    Here’s an example:

    [su_document url=”http://smarterbusinessprocesses.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Smartsheet-Discovery-Day.docx.pdf” width=”800″ height=”2300″ responsive=”no”]

    Mostly, everything is fine but – occasionally (about 10% of the time ) – the document just isn’t displayed.

    Refreshing the page in the browser often corrects the problem, but sometimes several page refreshes are required.

    I’ve encountered the problem on both Chrome and Safari browsers, and both on desktop and mobile devices.

    Strangely, comparing the HTML page source on pages where the document is displayed correctly and pages where the document is absent ( using the same browser and device ) yields no differences – which I find confusing!

    I can see that the shortcode makes use of docs.google.com to display the document. Could it be that recent changes here could be causing the problem ?

    The pages on the site have been unchanged, and worked fine, for a couple of years or more – but there have been a host of changes to hosting provider/docs.google.com the shortcodes ultimate plugin and, of course, wordpress itself in the meantime!!

    I’m struggling to identify what might be going wrong here – and would very much appreciate advice on how to tackle this problem

    Regards,

    Mike

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Vladimir

    (@gn_themes)

    1 year, 11 months ago

    Hi Mike,

    sorry for the late reply.

    The document shortcode uses Google service to display documents. If you inspect its source code, you’ll notice that the shortcode only display an iframe:

    <iframe src="//docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.rtf" width="600" height="400" class="su-document"></iframe>

    I can’t tell you exactly what’s the problem on their side, but I also noticed the issue a couple of times.

    Thread Starter MikepFive

    (@mikepfive)

    1 year, 11 months ago

    Vladimir,

    thanks for your reply.

    I appreciate that problems like this – where a 3rd party is central to the solution – are difficult to diagnose.

    I was really just casting about to to see if anyone else had encountered the problem.

    The lack of response is probably down to there being not quite as many people using this shortcode as others, that it may not have been noticed by those who do and that it seems random in terms of frequency of occurrence.

    Certainly a docs.google.com problem – and unlikely that we’ll get to the bottom of it here.

    In the meantime, I’ve been casting about for a ‘better’ solution – but that’s not born any fruit yet either…..

    Regards,

    Mike

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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