Force to open "Save As..." popup open at text link click for PDF in HTML

Question

From an answer to Force a browser to save file as after clicking link:

<a href="path/to/file" download>Click here to download</a>

Use the download attribute, but take into account that it only works for files hosted in the same origin that your code. It means that users can only download files that are from the origin site, same host.

Download with original filename:

<a href="file link" download target="_blank">Click here to download</a>

Download with 'some_name' as filename:

<a href="file link" download="some_name" target="_blank">Click here to download</a>

Adding target="_blank" we will use a new Tab instead of the actual one, and also it will contribute to the proper behavior of the download attribute in some scenarios.

It follows the same rules as same-origin policy. You can learn more about this policy on the MDN Web Doc same-origin policy page

You can lern more about this download HTML5 attribute on the MDN Web Doc anchor's attributes page.

Meta tags are not a reliable way to achieve this result. Generally you shouldn't even do this - it should be left up to the user/user agent to decide what do to with the content you provide. The user can always force their browser to download the file if they wish to.

If you still want to force the browser to download the file, modify the HTTP headers directly. Here's a PHP code example:

$path = "path/to/file.pdf";
$filename = "file.pdf";
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');  // For Gecko browsers mainly
header('Last-Modified: ' . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', filemtime($path)) . ' GMT');
header('Accept-Ranges: bytes');  // Allow support for download resume
header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($path));  // File size
header('Content-Encoding: none');
header('Content-Type: application/pdf');  // Change the mime type if the file is not PDF
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=' . $filename);  // Make the browser display the Save As dialog
readfile($path);  // This is necessary in order to get it to actually download the file, otherwise it will be 0Kb

Note that this is just an extension to the HTTP protocol; some browsers might ignore it anyway.

I had this same issue and found a solution that has worked great so far. You put the following code in your .htaccess file:

<FilesMatch "\.(?i:pdf)$">
  ForceType application/octet-stream
  Header set Content-Disposition attachment
</FilesMatch>

It came from Force a File to Download Instead of Showing Up in the Browser.

I found a very simple solution for Firefox (only works with a relative rather than a direct href): add type="application/octet-stream":

<a href="./file.pdf" id='example' type="application/octet-stream">Example</a>

Generally it happens, because some browsers settings or plug-ins directly open PDF in the same window like a simple web page.

The following might help you. I have done it in PHP a few years back. But currently I'm not working on that platform.

<?php
    if (isset($_GET['file'])) {
        $file = $_GET['file'];
        if (file_exists($file) && is_readable($file) && preg_match('/\.pdf$/',$file)) {
            header('Content-type: application/pdf');
            header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$file\"");
            readfile($file);
        }
    }
    else {
        header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
        echo "<h1>Error 404: File Not Found: <br /><em>$file</em></h1>";
    }
?>

Save the above as download.php.

Save this little snippet as a PHP file somewhere on your server and you can use it to make a file download in the browser, rather than display directly. If you want to serve files other than PDF, remove or edit line 5.

You can use it like so:

Add the following link to your HTML file.

<a href="download.php?file=my_pdf_file.pdf">Download the cool PDF.</a>

Reference from: This blog