The traditional way that a webpage provides a download for a user is by either opening it into a new window or redirecting to it. It may also choose to set the “Content-Disposition” response-header with a filename:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=your_filename.pdf

This is the common-way. However, this will force a download. What if you just want to present the document to the browser for it to be displayed to the user? Well, it turns out that RFC 2183 (“The Content-Disposition Header Field”) also provides you the “inline” type:

Content-Disposition: inline; filename=your_filename.pdf

This accomplishes what we want; The document will [probably] open in the browser, but, if the user wants to save it, it’ll default to the given filename.