Make PDFs Private?

If you want people to be able to view the PDFs in the viewer without downloading them, you can use the private document support in GDE 2.5.x. A full description of this feature and potential limitations is here:

https://www.davistribe.org/gde/secure-docs/

If you want to prevent viewing as well, you’ll have to put the post containing the viewer in a protected member area as a whole. Can’t say whether this will meet your needs or not, but hope this helps.

Sounds like this could very well work. How would i go about making a protected area?

You don’t have to do anything special. In a clean install of GDE 2.5.x – adjust this appropriately if you’ve changed your available profiles – just add the usual GDE shortcode, but set the profile to “2” or “max-doc-security” like this:

[gview file="https://url.to/file.pdf" profile="max-doc-security"]

For added security you may wish to create a new folder using FTP, etc. to store all your otherwise “hidden” documents, and use that URL in the shortcode above. You can also increase security by blocking search engine indexing on that whole folder using robots.txt or whatever is appropriate for your server. But in general, just using this shortcode syntax will make the document inaccessible to the vast majority of users.

Hope this helps.

Wonderful, thank you!

I installed everything, but am getting an error when viewing the PDF page:

GDE Error: Error retrieving file - if necessary turn off error checking (401:Unauthorized)

I tried uninstalling and re installing and still get the same error. I also turned of error checking, but still get an error. And for the shortcode I tried using the file name and the full URL.

It appears you’ve placed your documents in a folder that requires login to access? This is not supported, as Google needs to be able to access the files for conversion. Please see the FAQ (Will it embed files that are password-protected or stored in protected folders/sites? and What about private documents?).