I have a small wsp containing a masterpage and a stylesheet that will act as the standard branding for many SP site collections in my company. One of the requirements is to have a footer with a link to a Terms & Conditions PDF in the masterpage. So I'd like this PDF to be deployed in this WSP with the masterpage and styles so that we don't have to manually add it when a new site collection is created.
My question is where is the best place to deploy this file so that I can easily link to it from anywhere in the site collection (i.e. top level site vs subsite)? I was thinking a mapped folder would be best, but I'm not sure, and frankly I'm not sure how to link to a file in a mapped folder. Am I making this too difficult, should I just put the file in one centralized public place and hard-code the link in the master page? Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks.