Converting PDF/Word Docs into Help Center articles

FYI, we're trying to turn PDFs into Zendesk articles.  I've tried a number of routes today, but here's where I'm finding success . . . instead of starting with the PDFs that the public now sees, I've found the creator of the original documents who did them in Word.  I've uploaded the original Word document to Google Drive and converted it to a Google Document.  Then I've used the Google Doc importer in Zendesk.

It's not been perfect, but the images (we use lots of computer screenshots in our documentation) are sharp (unlike other paths I tried).  The only imperfection has been when we used Word shapes on top of our screenshots to highlight something . . . these look fine in Google Docs, but these shapes don't make it when using the Zendesk importer; we might need to either a) change text so it doesn't say things like "see the highlighted red box in the image below", or b) when a highlighted image is essential, recreate the image and upload into the Zendesk article directly.

I'm open to other suggestions - just thought I'd share my experience.

Robert and Brian - 

I encourage you to share your feedback in the Product Feedback topic. Here's how to write an effective feedback post. 

@Brian equally as frustrated by this... 

So I have gathered that ZD no longer allows for PDF storage as assets.

Let's be realistic here.  The effort to convert PDF's to something ZD likes is tremendous.

The iframe solution works but that would require one to store their PDF's in a third party repository and provide the URL in the embed code.

Are others doing this?  Using like DropBox, or Google Drive.

B

Hi Søren!

You're correct; PDFs are not a supported file type for Help Center assets. One thing you could consider would be to convert the PDF to an image file such as .jpg or .gif, which are supported file types.

Hello, Im trying to upload a pdf as an asset, but im told the file type is not supported.

Any tips?

I'm glad it's working now!

Hi there,

Yes we are hosting on our ZD instance, in Assets.  

I opened a ticket, they did a test pdf which worked.

I couldn't get the desired pdf to work. I uploaded a fresh copy of it, used your suggestion to change the PDF source ref and somehow it started working today. It's strange because I tried on IE as well as Chrome and it was happening to me and another Agent.

But we're good now.  Thanks for responding!

@heather, are you hosting the PDF in your Zendesk instance?  In Assets or where?

Try copying the code from a previous article and just changing the PDF src reference... does that work?