This is an archived forum post. The information may be outdated. Contact us if you have any questions.

"Save to PDF Link" & IE7

kizmar wrote on 2011-07-06:
I'm trying to use the "Save to PDF Link" method of the PDFCrowd service. It appears to be working in everything except IE7. In IE7 it's just redirecting to the PDFCrowd home page.

Is this method supported in IE7? If so, what can I check to see if I'm doing something wrong?

To test this I'm having to Remote Desktop to a PC that has IE7 on it, I'm assuming that's not causing the problem, but I thought I'd mention it here just in case. :)

Thanks in advance!
support wrote on 2011-07-07:
The "Save to PDF Link" relies on HTTP referrer which is not required by the HTTP Protocol.

However, vast majority of browsers in current use send the referrer information. As far as IE 7.0 is concerned, it seems that there is no definitive answer. There are reports that some IE7 installs send the information whereas some installs don't.
kizmar wrote on 2011-07-07:
Hmm... so what's the quickest work-around if we're trying to use this on a site that has to support IE7 & 8?
support wrote on 2011-07-07:
Unfortunately, there is no work around. The link requires an http referrer in order to work correctly.

An alternative option to the Save to PDF link is a server side solution which uses our API
support wrote on 2011-07-07:
To get a better picture we analyzed our logs and here is the result:

  • 10% of IE7 requests came without a referrer
  • 6% of IE8 requests came without a referrer


There might be other reasons for a missing referrer:

  • No referrer is sent when you go from https to http. So one should link to https://pdfcrowd.com/url_to_pdf/ when using the Save to PDF Link on an https page.
  • In some cases the referrer can be removed by firewall/security software.
kizmar wrote on 2011-07-07:
Great info. That will give me a couple things to troubleshoot. Thanks!
kizmar wrote on 2011-07-08:
For future reference:

We were using JavaScript to throw a confirm() alert to "Save to PDF". That's what was causing IE7 to go into "don't send the referrer" mode. Once I changed that confirm() JS method back to simply clicking on a link, it worked.
support wrote on 2011-07-08:
Great, thanks for reporting back!