How to download PDFs using FTP link

I have a couple of clients who want their customers to be able to download PDFs from their websites. At the moment I use Dropbox to do this. One client is not happy that Dropbox cannot open PDFs on a mobile phone, It has been suggested that I use an independent FTP site to house the PDFs. I am a new web-designer and new to Webflow, has anyone any experience of doing this or any advise about how |I should proceed?

The answer to your question is yes you can use any FTP repository to externally host your PDF files and share them on your Webflow site.

But you can keep using Dropbox and still give your client what they want, by altering the Dropox URL.

When you generate a link to a file from Dropbox, it’s actually a link to a Dropbox page showing the PDF. With all the limitations said page can have (not opening on mobile).

The link looks like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2uato51vyfm30yu/your-file.pdf?dl=0

You can transform this link to a direct link to the file. That way, the mobile OS will take over and show you the PDF natively, and propose you all the options available for the file type (on iOS, it would be "Open in iBooks, Send to iCloud Drive, Open in … [any compatible app].

To do this, replace www.dropbox by dl.dropboxusercontent in the URL

Your URL becomes:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/2uato51vyfm30yu/your-file.pdf?dl=0

It’s convenient for PDF files but also it’s the only way to use Dropbox for HTML5 videos, as you need a direct link to the file. And many other use cases.

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Is this possible with Google Drive as well? :blush: :sunny:

No. Before, you could change the obtained URL from

<code>https://drive.google.com/file/d/FILE_ID/edit?usp=sharing

To this:

<code>https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=FILE_ID

But they changed the URLs and now you just get a token like this:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxZec9ai3pOJZFhWQVhfcV9JN0E

There are numerous sites to generate direct urls from given url but none of them work anymore.

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Brilliant Vincent - thank you - I will attempt the changes :smile:

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