Squarespace is a company that lets literally everyone create a website. It takes away the middle man that you would traditionally hire to set up a website and has an easy-to-understand system where you can create the whole website on your own!
The way this works is that Squarespace handles everything, from the design to the hosting, and gives you tonnes of different options to choose from too. You get a bunch of templates that you can scroll through and choose your entire design.
For a lot of people, the website design only involves a few photos, and the bulk of it is based on text. Although a website like this is perfectly fine, some people prefer not to type out everything they want on the site itself and instead, upload a PDF file directly onto it.
If a PDF file is embedded into a webpage, it makes it easier for the readers to scroll through the information and they can easily save the pages as well. When you need to update the information, you can easily swap out the entire pdf in one go instead of having to delete pages or text on its own and then replacing it. It’s simply a lot easier to work with.
An issue people end up having to deal with when their website is on Squarespace is the fact that there’s no official easy way to upload or embed a PDF into a webpage. This doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, just that you need to do it manually.
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Adding a PDF into a web page on Squarespace
Now, there are two different ways that a PDF can be a part of your webpage. The first one is to not display the PDF itself but have it linked on the page so people can click on it.
In this way, the users would click on the link on your page, and be redirected over to the actual PDF to be able to view it.
The only downside to this is the fact that the PDF won’t show up on the page, this can be detrimental if you have vital things like images or graphs in the PDF file because no one would be able to see them until they click on the PDF link. Although, if your PDF file is mainly text, and doesn’t have anything that needs to be visible on the web page, this would work pretty well.
To link a PDF on a Squarespace page, you have to
- Add a regular text block.
- Add text into it and then highlight it.
- Then click on the “link” icon right under the text block.
- A little text field will pop up which will let you add a link in, and there will be a gear icon on the side, click it.
- This will give you an option that says “File”. You can click on this and go ahead and choose whether you want to upload a PDF file or choose one already uploaded into your library.
- Click Save and your PDF will be linked into the text!
How to embed a PDF into a web page on Squarespace
If you want to embed the entire PDF onto the web page, you will have to do a few extra steps outside of the actual Squarespace website.
Go to the official Issuu website (www.issuu.com) and log into your account, or create one if you don’t already have one.
Once you are logged in, you will see an option that says “Add content” and click on it.
You will now see a box where you can drag and drop your PDF file, or you can click the button below that lets you select the file instead.
Once you have the file selected, it will begin uploading to the issuu publications list.
Then you will need a specific issuu code that corresponds with your PDF file. This is what you will use to embed the PDF to your web page.
On the publications tab, select the PDF you want the code for, and click on the option that says “embed on website.”
Scroll through the options that pop up afterward and finish the process by clicking on “save and get code.”
Copy the code
To embed the code into Squarespace, in your editor, click the insert button wherever you want to insert your PDF code into
Select the option “code” and paste your PDF code into it
Click “Apply”
Once your PDF is in place, click “Save” to publish the PDF on your Squarespace!
