🌐 Qwiki Manual
User Guide / Authoring & Content Formats / PDFs, Google Docs & Remote Transclusion

PDFs, Google Docs & Remote Transclusion

In addition to locally authored Markdown, HTML, and Forms, Standalone Qwiki lets you bring PDFs, published Google Docs, and documents hosted on other Qwiki instances directly into your navigation tree.

Embedded PDFs (.pdf)

Upload any PDF via New Document in the sidebar:

  • Standalone Qwiki renders PDFs inside a responsive full-height iframe viewer alongside a direct download link.
  • PDFs participate in sidebar ordering, drag-and-drop nesting, category visibility rules, and cryptographic share links just like Markdown chapters.

Published Google Docs (gdoc)

To embed a live Google Doc without duplicating content:

  1. In Google Docs, open File ➔ Share ➔ Publish to web and copy the published link.
  2. In Qwiki, click New Document, select Google Doc, and paste the URL.
  3. If you forget ?embedded=true, Standalone Qwiki appends it automatically and cleans the embedded HTML so it blends cleanly with your portal's light or dark theme.

Federated Remote Documents (type: "remote")

When multiple teams run separate Standalone Qwiki portals, you can transclude a document from an external Qwiki instance using its public share link (?share=...) instead of copying and letting pages drift out of sync.

Key Behaviors

  • Single Source of Truth: Transcluded documents are strictly read-only locally so edits never diverge from the upstream source.
  • Canonical Asset Rewriting: Relative images and media inside the upstream page automatically rewrite to the origin wiki's URLs.
  • Local Cache with Offline Fallback: Qwiki caches fetched payloads under uploads/cache/ (default TTL: 1 hour). If the upstream wiki is temporarily unreachable, readers still see the last cached version cleanly.
  • Manual Sync Button: Signed-in admins see a sync action in the document view to pull fresh changes immediately without waiting for cache expiration.
  • Built-in SSRF Protection: Qwiki validates remote URLs to allow only public http/https hosts, blocking localhost, .local, private RFC 1918 networks, and loopback/link-local addresses.