Normally putting the URL of a pdf on a line by itself doesn’t display the pdf on a WordPress page, and if you use the add media button and paste the URL for the pdf into the URL field, you get a link that will open the pdf, but the pdf does not display on the page itself, e.g.:
http://learninginaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Sonja-K-Movement-News-Nov.-20121.pdf
But by installing the free Embedly plugin and pasting the URL of the pdf on its own line in the page editor, the multipage pdf file should display right on the page:
Click to access Sonja-K-Movement-News-Nov.-2012.pdf
And here’s the same document using an alternative plug-in called Embed Any Document.
You can embed pdf files from most anywhere, for example here’s one that is on a Slack channel.
Fantastic plugin, simple to understand its benefits to the websites that I run. One snag that I discovered when the pdf didn’t render on my first post, was that I needed to toggle from the visual editor of WordPress to the text editor and remove the tags that somehow found their way on the same line as the url text.
Yep, like other Oembed protocol URLs it has to be on a line by itself. The visual editor in WordPress tends to wrap the pasted URL in “p” tags.