Help With Downloading
HTML vs. PDF
Some of the documents a the CS Ed Library are in HTML format. This has
the advantage that you can just click on them and see the results immediately
without any special software. Also, HTML is nice for reading things online,
since it uses your font preferences and it does not introduce unnecessary
page breaks. On the other hand, HTML files do not include the image files.
So if you copy an HTML file to look at later, the necessary image files
may be missing. (Internet Explorer includes a Save As Archive feature can
save an HTML document with its images, but it's a proprietary format. It
would be nice if the W3C created a standard for this problem.)
PDF
PDF can be a little more complex to download, but PDF files include all
the necessary images so they are self-contained. For every HTML document
in the CS Ed Library, there is a PDF version available. The PDF version
is exactly the same content -- just the format is different.
PDF Download
Usually, just clicking the PDF link will download the file. If that confuses
the browser, try your browser's "Save Link As" (right-click, or click-hold)
command to download the PDF and save it as a local file. Then you can either
(a) drag and drop the file onto Acrobat to open it, or (b) run Acrobat
and then use the Open command to open the file. This has the advantage
that you have more control about saving and naming the file where you want.
There is a known bug in IE 4.x where it gets confused downloading binary
files such as PDF. A workaround may be to option click the link to save
it as a file. There is also a known bug in IE 4.x, and 5.x here the client
requests the same download multiple times in quick succssion which will
slow everything down. Run IE 5.0.1 sp2 or 5.5 sp1 to avoid this problem.
PDF Details
The Acrobat
Reader program that displays PDFs is available for free from Adobe.
You don't have to register -- you can just skip right to the download step.
If you can downlod the file, but Acrobat won't display it, you probably
have a problem with your browser configuration. I think the Acrobat installer
tries to set this for you when you install Acrobat, but sometimes it doesn't
stick.
CSLibrary provides the PDF file with their correct MIME type which is
application/pdf. Your browser needs to know that files with that
MIME type should be viewed using Acrobat. You configure your browser to
do that in its preferences. In Netscape it's called the "helpers" or "applications".
In IE it's called "File Helpers". In any case, configure your browser so
that the MIME type application/pdf is handled by Acrobat. Sometimes
you have the choice of using the "plug-in" or "application" handling. I
recommend using "application" because I think it's a little more reliable.
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