Students have been telling me they have a hard time getting at the documents (homework, lecture notes, etc.) that I have linked to on my web site. I have put these documents into the Adobe .pdf format, since that is the only format I know that can be viewed on the web without writing a whole new document in HTML code. Here are some suggestions to try if you are having trouble:
1. First find out if you have a viewer for .pdf files on your machine. If you do, then go to step 3. I'm told that all the Windows machines at UM computing sites already have the Adobe Acrobat viewer installed, while the Apple machines have something else that will do the job.
2. If you do not have a .pdf viewer on your machine, you will need to get one. Go to the Adobe Download Site and follow the instructions there for downloading the Adobe Acrobat viewer. It's easy, but it takes some time.
3. Once you have a viewer on your machine, then click on the link to the document you want in your browser (such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer). If the browser knows about the viewer, then the document will come up on the screen for you to read or print. To print, go to step 6.
4. If instead the browser doesn't recognize the file type or doesn't know a viewer is available, it will give you a message something like this. You should then just click on "save" or "download," to download the file to a drive on your machine.
5. Once that is done, go outside your browser, find the file you have downloaded on your drive, and click on it to view it in your viewer. Or find the Adobe Acrobat viewer, start it, and have it open the file.
6. Once you are viewing the document in Adobe Acrobat or another viewer, you can ask it to print a hard copy if that is what you want. Just click on the printer icon, or select Print from the File menu.
Good Luck! If all else fails, ask a consultant for help. And if even that doesn't work, send me an e-mail (alandear@umich.edu) and tell me about it. I'd really like to get this working so that all my students can take advantage of it.