Working With Media (Part 2) — Smashing Magazine

Gatsby is a true Jamstack framework. It works with React-powered components that consume APIs before optimizing and bundling everything to serve as static files with bits of reactivity. That includes media files, like images, video, and audio.

The problem is that there’s no “one” way to handle media in a Gatsby project. We have plugins for everything, from making queries off your local filesystem and compressing files to inlining SVGs and serving images in the responsive image format.

Which plugins should be used for certain types of media? How about certain use cases for certain types of media? That’s where you might encounter headaches because there are many plugins — some official and some not — that are capable of handling one or more use cases — some outdated and some not.

That is what this brief two-part series is about. In Part 1, we discussed various strategies and techniques for handling images, video, and audio in a Gatsby project.

This time, in Part 2, we are covering a different type of media we commonly encounter: documents. Specifically, we will tackle considerations for Gatsby projects that make use of Markdown and PDF files. And before wrapping up, we will also demonstrate an approach for using 3D...