Extract embedded pdf with wordpress cookies using cURL / XHR

I’m trying to use cURL to extract an embedded PDF located at site that requires a username/password login (wordpress cookie). The actual file is located here, and the login is located here.

I was trying to follow steps here and here but am still getting a broken PDF as a result. Here’s what I’ve tried:

1. Get cURL command to log into server
   • Load login page for website and open Network pane of Developer Tools
     In firefox, right click page, choose ‘Inspect Element (Q)’ and click
     on Network tab
   • Go to login form, enter username, password and log in
   • After you have logged in, go back to Network pane and scroll to the
     top to find the POST entry.
   • Right click and choose Copy -> Copy as CURL
   • Paste this to a text editor
2. Save session cookie:
   • Using the pasted info from #1, remove the entry -H 'Cookie: <somestuff>'
   • Insert -curl -c login_cookie.txt to the beginning and run the code
   • this saves ‘login_cookie.txt’ to the folder
     *the issue I have at this point is login_cookie.txt does not appear to have worked. When opening up the .txt file, I’m seeing "fakesessid" and a lot of FALSE & TRUE messages in the .txt file that I can’t figure out
3. Get cURL command to the actual PDF
   • go to the actual webpage where the PDF is located
   • inspect element, go to Network tab, look for the XHR file (size is ~equal to the size of PDF I want downloaded)
   • Right click and choose Copy -> Copy as CURL
   • paste this into text editor
   • remove the entry -H 'Cookie: <somestuff>'
   • Insert -curl -b login_cookie.txt to the beginning
   • Insert --output filename.pdf to the end and run code
     *At this point of the process, I do see a PDF downloaded, but the PDF is corrupt.

What am I doing wrong? My exact codes (less password info located below):

Code to save login cookies:

curl -c login_cookie.txt 'https://fddexchange.com/wp-login.php' \
  -H 'accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7' \
  -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7' \
  -H 'cache-control: max-age=0' \
  -H 'content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
  -H 'origin: https://fddexchange.com' \
  -H 'priority: u=0, i' \
  -H 'referer: https://fddexchange.com/login-2/' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua: "Google Chrome";v="129", "Not=A?Brand";v="8", "Chromium";v="129"' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?1' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-platform: "Android"' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-dest: document' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-mode: navigate' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-origin' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-user: ?1' \
  -H 'upgrade-insecure-requests: 1' \
  -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/129.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36' \
  --data-raw 'pmpro_login_form_used=1&log=REDACTEDUSERNAME&pwd=REDACTEDPWORD&wp-submit=Log+In&redirect_to='

Code to download PDF:

curl 'https://fddexchange.com/?title=Dogtopia%20Complete%20FDD%20April%2015%202024&index=1&pdfID=86513&pdfemb-serveurl=https%3A%2F%2Ffddexchange.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsecurepdfs%2F2024%2F05%2FDogtopia-Complete-FDD-April-15-2024.pdf&pdfemb-nonce=baee332b39' \
  -H 'accept: */*' \
  -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7' \
  -H 'priority: u=1, i' \
  -H 'referer: https://fddexchange.com/?title=Dogtopia%20Complete%20FDD%20April%2015%202024&index=1&pdfID=86513&pdfemb-serveurl=https%3A%2F%2Ffddexchange.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsecurepdfs%2F2024%2F05%2FDogtopia-Complete-FDD-April-15-2024.pdf' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua: "Google Chrome";v="129", "Not=A?Brand";v="8", "Chromium";v="129"' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?1' \
  -H 'sec-ch-ua-platform: "Android"' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-dest: empty' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-mode: cors' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-origin' \
  -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/129.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36' 

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