Export and published sites
Start from what you are seeing rather than from what you think is broken. Each page below names the symptom, explains why it happens, and says what to do about it.
Several of these are the product working as designed, which is worth knowing before anybody raises a ticket.
#At a glance
Symptom | Usually because |
|---|---|
Signed-out readers on a public page see "Sign in to view this PDF" or "PDF unavailable" instead of t | Signed-out visitors are never issued a Capable access token, so the app cannot fetch the file for them, whether it comes from a link or an attachment. The macro itself still renders. |
"This PDF is too large" | A PDF loaded from a web address is fetched through Capable's proxy, which refuses anything over 2.5 MB. The limit is not shown in the macro editor. |
"The website hosting this PDF blocked the request." | The file sits behind a login, a signed or expiring URL, a firewall or a bot manager. The proxy fetches from a server with none of the reader's cookies, so anything that depends on the reader |
"This file does not look like a PDF." | The address returned something that is not a PDF (an HTML login or error page is the usual culprit), or an attachment was selected whose contents are not really a PDF. |
"This PDF is password protected." | Password-protected documents are not supported and there is no place to enter a passphrase. |
Configured PDF disappeared after changing "Types of file" | Switching between Public URL, Existing Page Attachment and New File Upload deliberately clears the previous source. |
Exporting the Confluence page to PDF or Word leaves a gap where the embed was | The macro has no server-rendered representation for Confluence's own page export. |
Published Capable Site shows "PDF embed: the configured PDF could not be exported" | Neither the linked file nor the attachment could be resolved when the site was built. |
Externally hosted PDF still points at the original website after a site deploy, and breaks for some | The site build tries to copy the file into the published output and quietly falls back to the original web address if that download fails. |
Adding the PDF's host to the Suite's approved domains made the embed stop working | An approved host is fetched directly by the reader's browser instead of through Capable's proxy, and most PDF hosts do not permit browsers on other domains to read their files. |
Pasting a PDF link into the editor does not create a PDF embed | The macro does not claim pasted links; there is no automatic conversion. |
#In this section
#Related
Most of these are expected behaviour.
