When you browse to an academic journal article’s website, for example this one1, if you are lucky and the manuscript is not paywalled, you can read the HTML version of the article which usually looks something like the one shown in Figure 1.
Vintage technophiles like myself still prefer reading (and archiving) the manuscript’s PDF version. But these publishers are smart and have implemented new data-harvesting accessibility features such as “fancy online PDF readers”. So when you click on the PDF/EPUB link on the page, instead of just getting the PDF, you see Figure 2 instead.
This bugs me: I just want the PDF and every additional click and UI idiosynchracy adds friction to my daily work. So I did what any reasonable person would do and wrote a little Firefox extension that skips journals’ “enhanced” PDF viewers to direct PDF downloads. You can get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pdf-direct/. After installing PDF-Direct, clicking on the PDF/EPUB link will immediately just download the darn PDF (Figure 3).
An additional problem with these “fancy online PDF readers” is that they seem to break Zotero’s ability to download PDF files, though I am not sure if that is the reason. I’m quite busy and don’t actually know/care about how these Firefox extensions work: PDF-direct is 99% vibe-coded but seems to work well. It is also simple enough that I am able to see that it probably doesn’t have any real security implications. I might be wrong though, so send your reports to https://github.com/mvuorre/pdf-direct.
Footnotes
Goes without saying that this particular (quite nice) article has nothing to do with the topic of this post, I just happened to be reading it and since it was open access I was able to show how this works in practice.↩︎
Reuse
Citation
@online{vuorre2025,
author = {Vuorre, Matti},
title = {PDF-Direct},
date = {2025-07-03},
url = {https://vuorre.com/posts/pdf-direct/},
langid = {en}
}