Obviously if you are viewing the PDF in your browser, you could get attacked. Browsers are imperfect, and the PDF format is filled with vulnerabilities (that continue to be found.)
However, it's very highly unlikely that simply viewing a page with a link to a malware file would cause an infection, but we can't definitively say no. Historic attacks have stepped along paths that once upon a time could have led to infection, but those were ancient exploits that happened back in the early 2000s. Browser and OS security have improved greatly since then.
For performance reasons, some browsers performed prefetching of links, with the idea that while you were looking at page A, you will probably click to page B. The browser would therefore download the pages to your cache, even if you didn't click the link. (Note the referenced page is from 2003.)
There are also exploits that have taken advantage of disk indexing. When a file lands on your file system, the indexer would scan it and add the data to your computer's search database. Different types of files have been susceptible to these attacks, including JPG and TTF.
Theoretically, a browser could prefetch a malware file, and then infect you while the filesystem indexes it.
However, I don't know of any browsers that are still doing prefetching; most pages have hundreds of links, and a browser would have no way of knowing which links you might click on. Furthermore, most indexing systems have been reworked so they aren't as vulnerable as they once were.
It's not a vector that you should lose sleep worrying about.
