PDF Viewer Block for Gutenberg

by Jb Audras

Description

A simple, responsive and 100% free Gutenberg Block to display PDF Viewers / Readers on your website.

You can easily configure the Reader’s width, height and alignment on the fly.

Compatibility:
– Fully responsive
– Works fine on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge and IE11
– If javascript is disabled, a download link is provided as a fallback

This plugin uses PDF.js library, provided by Mozilla under Apache license.

Installation

Install the plugin and activate.
No settings page: just enjoy your new Gutenberg block! It’s available in Embeds > PDF Viewer.

Screenshots

Adding "PDF Viewer" Gutenberg Block on my Post.
Selecting/Uploading a PDF document.
Basic front-end rendering.
Selecting alignement for my PDF Reader.
Applying custom width and height.
"PDF Viewer" variations showcase.
Front-end rendering for the selected variations.

Reviews

I've tried a few and found this to be the best

By revanslacey on July 24, 2025

The presentation is not in the preview but shows landscape presentations just fine and scales to 100% - unlike any of the other ones I tried.

Highly functional and easy to use

By Senri Miura (senribb) on June 8, 2025

It works without any problems on smartphones. It's great that it's highly functional yet simple and easy to use.
However, if I may be greedy, I would like to be able to set default values for height, etc. in the plugin settings screen.
Also, I would like to be able to check the media file names of blocks embedded within blocks.

The best PDF Viewer

By Kerfred on June 24, 2021

Very easy to install and to use. No need to configure anything. And it works out of the box.

Great but Edge browser incompatible

By whdyer on March 23, 2021

A great block for PDF display but the block is incompatible with the current Microsoft edge browser and returns a false phishing warning page instead of PDF content. Works great in current Chrome browser. Will update to 5 stars when Edge is again supported properly.

Excelente Plugin

By claumigue on April 17, 2020

El mejor visor de pdf con todas las opciones incorporadas, responsive , un bloque muy sencillo de usar que no defrauda.

The best!

By leftezi on March 19, 2020

Excellent! Avesome! Works like a charm!

Switched to Gutenberg because of this plugin

By kccafe on December 12, 2019

This plugin does EXACTLY what I was wanting to do in terms of displaying PDF documents on my site, and I was willing to switch from the "classic" editor to Gutenberg because of it. Keep up the good work!

Currently the best way to embed PDFs

By jdaviescoates on October 6, 2019

This plugin is currently the best way to embed PDFs into posts/ pages etc. It has a simple block which just works. The only thing I'd say is that it'd be nice if it also displayed the embedded PDFs in the edit view too (like this one does https://wordpress.org/plugins/embed-pdf-viewer/ but that one also has an issue, see https://wordpress.org/support/topic/uploading-from-within-block-doesnt-work/ ) (that issue now resolved so given that plugin 5 stars and downgraded this to 4 stars to reflect the fact Embed PDF viewer is not my favourite plugin for doing this) Actually, this plugin works a lot better on mobiles than Embed PDF viewer, and so this my favourite again so upped this back to 5 stars 🙂 I'd still like to see the PDF embed in edit view in this plugin too though.

Easy to use in Gutenberg

By vabkadmin on June 13, 2019

Easy to use plugin as a block in Gutenberg. Showing the pdf-file with option to full screen view, download etc.

Changelog

1.1

Performances: Enqueue admin assets only when showing the block editor screen.

1.0.1

Fix XSS security vulnerability. Thanks @wpscan who responsively disclosed the issue.

1.0

Enqueue scripts and styles only when the block is displayed for better performance and Google Core Web Vitals compliance.

0.2

Declare support for WordPress 5.5 and Block Directory.

0.1

Plugin initial commit. Works fine 🙂