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PDFA-TUTO-004
Updated
Tutorial · Distribution

Share a document on Facebook, X or LinkedIn

There is no button to click: you paste the link of the share into your post, and the network fetches the preview of the document itself. What follows is mostly about checking what it shows.

01Copy the link of the share

In Public sharings, open the share and click Copy the link. That is the address people can read out and retype.

02Paste the link into your post

Paste it into the message you are preparing, on Facebook, on X or on LinkedIn. All three recognise the address and go looking for something to build a preview from.

Once the preview appears under your message, you can remove the address from the text: the preview stays, and the message reads better.

03Check the preview before posting

The preview shows the first page of the document, its name and a line of description. If you see the PDF Archive logo instead, that share is not giving out its preview, and the reason is always one of the three listed below.

04Post, then check the link from another account

Open your post from a browser where you are not logged in to the social network. That is the only way to see what a stranger sees, preview included.

05Worth knowing

When the preview of the document does not appear

Three cases, and only one of them is a setting of yours.

  • The share is password protected. Its preview is never exposed, otherwise the protection would be pointless.
  • The share was created without a preview, a box in the advanced options.
  • The preview has not been produced yet. It is made shortly after the upload, so wait a minute and post again.
The networks keep the preview in memory

Once your link has been shared, the network keeps the image and the title it read. If you change the name of the document afterwards, the old preview may stay on posts that are already online for a while.

Posting on a network makes the link public for good

A link posted publicly is copied, archived and picked up by robots nobody controls. If the document should not circulate freely, do not post it: send it, and protect it with a password.

Indexing asks for a separate permission

Social networks display your document, they do not put it into search engines. Those are two different mechanisms, and the second one needs explicit permission.

Getting the document ready before publishing it

On social media the document is seen by people who do not know you: a light file opens, a marked version stays identifiable, and a QR code leads back to the source.

Compress a PDF
Reduce the weight of a file, at the quality level you pick.
Add a watermark
Mark every page of a document, diagonally or in the footer.
Embed a QR code
Stamp a QR code on the first page, or on all of them.
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