GDE 2.6 not displaying embedded PDF box

Thank you all for posting.

It sounds like Google’s viewer was down for a while, but every site I’ve checked seems to be working now.

Unfortunately, that’s the problem with relying on a (free) third party service – Google are in a position to change their viewer at any time, or of course it can be unavailable.

That was the reason for creating the PDF Embedder plugin. It doesn’t rely on any third-party service, so if it does break, it must be something on your site that has changed. This gives you much more control.

(usabilityboy, it must be a coincidence that your PDF Embedder wasn’t working either, or perhaps you were serving the PDF from Google Drive. If you are still having issues, I would be very happy to help track them down – please email me contact@wp-pdf.com)

Anyway, hopefully most of you are back on track now, but please get in touch if you believe you have a problem specific to your site.

Unfortunately, if Google’s viewer goes down again there’s nothing much we can do other than inform Google, if they are listening.

Thanks,

Dan

Thank you for all the updates.

Hopefully, for those who don’t want to change the way they are embedding documents, Google has restored the service but it is taking some time to roll out fully. It is possible they run their own cache of the files or display, and maybe that has been intermittent as the service is restored.

This plugin (Google Document Embedder) relies on Google’s free viewer service which has generally worked well for many years, but of course there is no guarantee that Google will continue to keep it running. It seems that (mostly) they do for now.

There are also limits in the number of views (or bandwidth) that they are happy to serve to the same person.

The files are stored on your WordPress server, but the rendering is done by a Google service that first fetches the file from your server.

For greater stability, I would recommend the following two plugins:

1. Google Drive Embedder

This uses similar technology to the Google Document Embedder plugin, but your files are hosted on Google Drive’s service already (saving your own bandwidth too). More importantly, it can be a paid service (through Google Apps), and crucially it is not anonymous to use. (Google’s Document viewer, used by Google Document Embedder, is completely anonymous in the sense that Google doesn’t know who is viewing or who is serving the file – and this gives a completely different sense of obligation from Google’s point of view, I believe.)

You would share your file as ‘Anyone with the link can view’ in Google Drive itself to ensure all your users are allowed to see the file.

Note this plugin requires you to configure the Google Apps Login plugin in addition – a relatively simple process.

2. PDF Embedder

This embeds PDFs in your site, entirely hosted within your server, using Javascript code that is also entirely hosted by your server. This means it does not rely on any third party such as Google to display it. If it ‘breaks’, that means something on your site has changed.

I hope this helps. If anyone wants to chase Google on the issues you’ve been seeing with the free and anonymous Google document viewer, feel free, but I don’t personally think it makes sense. They are unlikely to offer direct support for such services, and that is entirely fair.

Let’s give it a few days, and if things don’t seem to be better with the document viewer, we can at least warn users what to expect and they can make the call of switching.

I don’t feel it is productive for us to continue to post “hold on, it works right now, no it doesn’t” messages – or at least I won’t feel obliged to respond if that’s OK 🙂 Others are welcome to continue their own discussions of course.

Please also note that the above synopsis of my personal plugin recommendations has been available on the plugin description for a long time now.

Thanks,

Dan