About this plugin
Sacred PDF Viewer turns any PDF into a clean, in-page reading experience — one shortcode, no add-ons required, and nothing loaded from a third‑party service. Visitors read your documents right on the page instead of downloading a file or being bounced to a browser plugin, and search engines can still read every word inside the PDF.
Perfect for study notes, guides, whitepapers, reports, brochures, e‑books, datasheets, question banks and any document you want people to actually read on your site.
Why you’ll like it
- One-shortcode simple. Drop [sacredpdf url="…"] into any post, page or widget and you’re done.
- Reads on your site, not off it. The PDF renders in the browser with page navigation, zoom, fit‑width and true fullscreen — visitors never leave.
- Genuinely SEO‑friendly. Most PDF viewers paint pixels a crawler can’t read. Sacred PDF Viewer extracts the document’s real text and attaches it as the viewer’s accessible, crawlable fallback — invisible to visitors, indexable by Google.
- View‑only when you need it. Hide the download button, block right‑click “save”, and strip download links for the roles you choose, so premium documents stay on the page.
- Fast and self‑hosted. Every script is bundled and served from your own domain. No API keys, no external calls, no tracking.
- Optional highlighting. Let chosen roles highlight PDF text with colours and notes — saved per user and restored on their next visit (add‑on, see below).
Key features
- Clean inline viewer: previous/next page, zoom in/out, fit‑width and fullscreen.
- Search‑engine readable text. The viewer draws PDFs on a <canvas> (pixels, not text), so the plugin extracts the PDF’s text and adds it as the canvas’s accessible / crawlable fallback. Extraction uses pdftotext (poppler‑utils) server‑side when available for best quality; otherwise it falls back to in‑browser extraction with PDF.js — automatically. Results are cached per file, so it works on any host.
- Per‑role download control. Choose which audiences get no Download button, no right‑click “save image” and no download links, keeping a PDF view‑only for them.
- Optional PDF text highlighting (add‑on). Selected roles can select text on the PDF and highlight it with colours and notes, exactly like highlighting a normal post. Highlights are saved per user and restored on the next visit.
- Download with or without highlights. When a PDF has highlights, the download button offers both the original file and a copy with the highlights burned in.
- Works with any publicly reachable PDF URL — from your Media Library or elsewhere.
- Lightweight settings screen with tidy tabs: Viewer, SEO & Text, Downloads, and Highlight & Annotate.
Add PDF highlighting with Highlite Pro
The highlighting and annotation features are powered by our companion plugin, Highlite Pro. Sacred PDF Viewer works perfectly on its own; if you also install and activate Highlite Pro, a highlight toolbar appears on your PDFs so readers can mark up passages with colours and personal notes — great for course notes, legal documents, research and study material. You choose exactly which user roles are allowed to highlight, and the plugin will even offer a one‑click “Activate Highlite Pro” button once it’s installed.
Highlite Pro is entirely optional.
Usage
Embed a PDF with either form:
pdf"]
pdf[/sacredpdf]
Then visit Settings → Sacred PDF Viewer to fine‑tune SEO text extraction, download restrictions and highlighting.
Privacy & third‑party libraries
Sacred PDF Viewer makes no external requests — it does not contact any third‑party API, CDN or analytics service, and it sets no cookies of its own. Two open‑source libraries are bundled locally and served from your site:
- PDF.js 4.4.168 by Mozilla — Apache License 2.0 — renders PDFs in the browser.
- pdf-lib 1.17.1 — MIT License — used only to write highlights into a downloaded copy of a PDF.