Is there a stack that can make a file like a PDF download instead of show in the users browser? I know you can zip the file and generally that will download it but I would rather not do that.
If there is such a stack hopefully this might solve my other problem of creating a downloadable link with using Joe’s Link stack and the built in Stack text inside of that. Seems like extra work to have to use two stacks to make a link out of what is clearly a URL.
Take a look at True Download by DooBox, it might do this. This can also be done with Joe’s TotalCMS, but i am sure that is a little overkill for what you need.
Check the download attribute.
Just a small observation but not everybody wants files being downloaded automatically when they click on a link, even when it’s just a PDF. I had a similar situation and chose instead to simply open PDF files in another tab.
If the PDF is a .zip file in resourses with a link to any of the Button stacks, will that not simply download instead of being viewed in the browser?
I would suggest that forcing a download of a PDF file is breaking a bit of the “standard” UI/UX and that should be considered quite carefully.
Thank you, I have purchased “True Download” it is kind of nice in that it creates a zipped file out of any file you link to and gives a nice little active dialog to the user with the download count if you need. I might use it but I don’t like that you have to have all the files in the resources folder in Rapid Weaver. The developer replied that there isn’t a way around this (at least not currently).
I will probably just end up using Link Box and the tags download from Jody’s post
Very much considered, I have an inline version of the PDF already but this just gives the nice option for when it loads to slowly for them to see a text link to download the file so they don’t pass over content on slower connections.
Thank you all for your help!
Maybe a bit of text: "Right-click and choose ‘Save Link As…’ " could help the users out. 
Quite welcome of course! 
If you intend to use .Zip files I would encode them using something like Yemuzip. This allows files to be encoded for Windows, so it strips any OS X metadata including file icons and other information stored in the resource fork.
By doing this the file will still work for both Windows and Mac but Windows users won’t be be left with strange looking unusable files. Hopefully True Download does that automatically.
Thanks ashleykaryl, that is helpful info!
