Viewing PDF documents with Adobe Acrobat

To view any file in Portable Document Format (PDF) downloaded from this site, you need the Adobe Acrobat Reader program. The program is freely available if you do not already have it.

For people with visual difficulties - useful information about services to make Acrobat documents more accessible is at access.adobe.com

Troubleshooting

Sometimes a PDF will open but only a blank page is visible. This may be because the view is zoomed into a blank section of the document. Use the dropdown view menu (bottom left hand corner of the screen) to select a suitable view - 100% or 'Fit Width' are usually best.

If you are still having problems, and are using Microsoft Explorer 4 or 5 for the PC, try clicking on the link to the PDF file you want to see with your right mouse button. This will bring up a small menu - if you select Save Target As from this you will be able to save the file and open it outside the browser.

If you are using Netscape 4 the option will be Save Link As - this has the same function.

Searching PDFs

When you click on the link to a PDF, it will open in your browser window. A toolbar will appear below the address bar, featuring a number of tools to help you view and search the document

Running your mouse over the icons, without clicking, will tell you what each of them does.

Especially useful is the Find Tool (a pair of binoculars) - click on the Find icon to search the document for a word or phrase. Click the next icon to the right to search for further occurences of the word or phrase.