PDF Embedder Mobile Settings require a Premium plan feature.
Unlock the PDF Embedder Mobile Settings and other powerful features.
Are you having issues with PDF Embedder behaving strangely on mobile? Mobile display issues usually come down to how the browser’s viewport and zoom settings interact with the plugin’s viewer. In most cases, a single setting change resolves the problem.
This guide covers the common mobile display issues and how to work through each one.
Disabling Device Zoom Setting
The most common mobile issue is the browser applying its own zoom adjustments on top of the plugin’s viewer, which causes distortion, clipping, or the toolbar disappearing off-screen. Enabling the Disable Device Zoom option adds a viewport meta tag to every page on your site that stops the browser from overriding zoom and hands that control entirely to the plugin.
You can enable this option in the PDF Embedder mobile settings and Save Changes.
This adds the following HTML to the <head> section of every page on your site:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=0" />
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)If your theme already includes a
<meta name="viewport">tag, remove the theme’s version to avoid conflicts. Two viewport tags on the same page can produce unpredictable behaviour.
Adjusting the Mobile Width Setting
By default, PDF Embedder switches to a “View in Full Screen” overlay when the embed area is narrower than 500 pixels. This is intentional behaviour designed to make small-width embeds usable on mobile. If the overlay is appearing in situations where you want the inline viewer, adjust the Mobile Width setting.
Go to the PDF Embedder mobile settings and change the Mobile Width value. Set it lower to make the inline viewer appear at narrower widths, or set it to 0 to always show the inline viewer regardless of screen width.
To override this on a per-embed basis, add the mobilewidth attribute to the shortcode:
[pdf-embedder url="https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/document.pdf" mobilewidth="200"]Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)Other issues on mobile are crashing or blank pages on mobile devices.
Frequently Asked Questions
Below, we’ve addressed some common questions about mobile display problems.
Will disabling device zoom affect the rest of my site?
The setting adds a viewport meta tag to every page, which disables pinch-to-zoom across the entire site. For most sites, this is acceptable, but if you rely on native browser zoom for accessibility reasons, consider using the mobilewidth="0" shortcode attribute on individual embeds instead, which shows the full inline viewer without affecting the global zoom behaviour.