How can I embed my pdf into my Web Help?

[erinep23]

I have Web Help which I publish. I want to be able to embed a pdf document on the page for people to be able to click and download. How can I do this? I know it is a stupid question, but I've never done it before. Thanks!

[RamonS]

Copy the PDF into the project folder and then link to it. That is the easiest way, the downside is that every time you generate help the file will be copied over into the output folder. That might not matter too much if the file is small. Do serve the help from a WebServer? If yes, copy the file to the web server and then craft a simple link to the applicable URL.

[erinep23]

Thank you for your reply. What do I use to link it? Hyperlink? Cross reference?

[RamonS]

Hyperlink.

[erinep23]

You said that the pdf needed to be copied to the project file. The pdf is generated in the project using a target. Is that good enough, to have it in the output, or does it need to be in another place in the project? Right now, when I click to add a hyperlink, I have no way (or rather, I see no way_ of getting to the output in order for it to link to the pdf.

[LTinker68]

Ah, you're talking about linking to the PDF you generated so a copy of that PDF is available to online users. Didn't realize that was what you were talking about.

I do the same thing, so what I did was set up a publishing scheme to publish a copy of the PDF into a content folder in my project. When I building the PDF output and decide it's good to be included with the online output, then I run the publishing event. When I then build the online output, the PDF in the content folder is automatically included.

[whunter]

I used External Resources to link to PDFs on a server, and then inserted links to the PDFs in my topics.

This is what I do to link to PDFs in my WebHelp, and it works fine for me. The PDFs are saved to a folder in my Resources directory, and I use the External Resources to sync to the latest version.

I originally published the PDFs directly to a folder in my Contents directory as Lisa described, but I got tired of all the warnings Flare popped up about writing to the Content directory. I don't know if I was doing something weird, but sometimes that warning would pop up like 10 times for one publishing instance. So now I publish out to the External Resources and then sync it back in.

[chunkee]

My resolve for the PDFs is to place them in the AutoSearch Folder on the webserver and use an absolute link to the PDF. That way it shows up in the nonhtml server side search for webhelp plus output (if PDF search filter is installed). That way, if there is an updated version of the document, I can copy and paste it to the folder, overwrite it without having the links needing to be updated.

JC