Sorry, by ‘theme’, I should have typed ‘template’. I’m kind of new to WP and the terminology escapes me sometimes.
I was originally (when it didn’t work) using one of our templates that has nothing on it (no html/head/body tag). That template is supposed to be used for pages that are embedded in pages (and so don’t need all those page tags). When I switched to a template that actually used get_header(), get_footer() and all that jazz to get the html markup from our header.php and footer.php files, the plug-in worked great.
So I’m guessing not having the proper page markup hindered the [embed] ability to do its job? If you want to look into it further, create a template that has absolutely nothing on it (except something displaying the post content), and use that as the template when using the plug in. it just shows up as plain text [embed]https://mydomain/files/filename.pdf[/embed]. If you use a template that uses html/head/body, problem solved.
