PDF embed 'Live embed' view not working

[VineetKatariya1]

Hi there, I am experiencing a problem with viewing PDFs as a live-embed on the 'embed' option.

I have been working on a Storymap for some time and had some PDF slideshows shown as a live-embed, so you could see the first page and click through the slides on the Storymap or open them in a new page. 

However, today, the live view has disappeared and it now says 'Hmm... there seems to be a problem' in a greyed-out box, and it will not show the slides. It still opens on a new page, but will not show them on the Storymap. 

I have tried deleting them and re-uploading, but it hasn't worked.

Does anyone have any ideas what could be happening here? 

Other options for viewing the PDF are welcome- but it really needs to show the first page of the slideshow or it will not make sense to the viewer (i.e., a button or link in text would not work).

Thank you for your help.

Best,

K

[BenLockwood]

I'm having the same issue. The PDFs in my storymap were displaying correctly as of Friday, but this morning are not. 

[OwenGeo]

@VineetKatariya1 @BenLockwood -- Can you share some of the links to the PDFs you are having issues with? We haven't made any changes in that area, so I'm not sure what might have caused things to work differently, but we can look into it if you can provide some links. In my tests, PDFs appear to be behaving as expected.

Please note that the server/file that you are embedding requires some specific headers in order to be displayed live inside a story. You can read more about that here:Frequently asked questions—ArcGIS StoryMaps | Documentation. Is it possible some security settings have changed on the server where these PDFs are hosted?

If you are unable to share links here, please contact Esri Support and they can help you troubleshoot further.

[BenLockwood]

The problem has been found with multiple PDFs, but here is a link to one

Today I've found that on my laptop, which is an Apple machine, these PDFs are loading correctly. It seems to only be on a Windows machine that there is an issue. 

[OwenGeo]

@BenLockwood -- I just did some testing and I'm unable to reproduce the issue on a Windows machine.

Can you verify that you are using the same link you provided above (which ends in /data) to embed the PDF in the story?

I'm asking because of you open that link in a browser, it redirects to a different URL that contains a token. If you copy the link from the browser address bar after you open it and use that link in a story the token will expire in a few hours or days, and the link will no longer work. So that could explain the PDFs displaying correctly for a while and then breaking.

[BenLockwood]

@OwenGeo For all embedded PDFs, I'm using the links that are generated at the bottom of the PDF Overview pages, after changing their permissions sharing to public (see attached screenshot)

[OwenGeo]

@BenLockwood -- I'd recommend that you please contact Esri Support for further help since we are unable to reproduce the issue.

[BenLockwood]

Circling back to this. I haven't had a chance to contact esri support directly, but have narrowed the problem down to occurring on Dell machines running Windows 10 enterprise.