Disable compression for Nginx serving PDFs

Question

How do I disable compression for PDFs using Nginx? Related question, how do I stop Adobe Reader from automatically opening the PDF, instead of saving it to the hard drive?

Answer 1

First, nginx enables gzip only for text/html by default so there is no compression when serving PDFs You can setup types you want to gzip (remember that for text/html is on always) by:

gzip_types text/css text/js text/xml;

Second is client side. I can't possibly think a way other then to told user to right-click and save to...

Answer 2

On the second part, you just have to set the Content-Disposition header to supply a preferred filename and the browser will display a save-file dialog.

I don't know how you would cause Nginx to do that, in php I just use this code:

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="wootwoot.pdf"');

Be sure to use this BEFORE php outputs any data…