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Optimizing Your Viewing of PDF Documents
There are two ways you can view the documents we provide
here: you can read them online directly from our server,
or you can save them locally. Each has pros and cons.
Choice 1: Reading Online From Server
This approach is the most straightforward. Simply point
at the link and the document will be displayed.
Note: Conflicts exist between Internet Explorer and the Acrobat
6.0 plug-in. Acrobat 6.0 users should upgrade to 6.0.1 or greater to
prevent Internet Explorer hangs when viewing PDFs.
There are two performance issues, however, each
explained below:
- Potential Reload Upon Leaving/Returning to Document
You may notice that if you leave one of these manuals
to view another web page in the same browser window,
and later return to it, the file will be downloaded
again. This will be noticeable on larger files.
The reason is that the files are "secured" documents: that
is, they are retrieved using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer).
By default both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer
do not cache secured documents. This behavior can be
changed in Navigator using Options/Network Preferences
to change "Allow persistent caching of pages retrieved
through SSL". There is no way currently to change this in
Internet Explorer.
- Potential Reload Upon Following Each Hyperlink
You may experience a download of the document every time
you follow an internal link in the document. Again, this
makes for painful viewing of a larger file.
This, too, can be changed to improve not only your viewing
of our manuals but of all web pages. The behavior is
controlled by the setting which tells your browser to
check if a file has been modified. Both Navigator and
Internet Explorer have options to check:
If set to Every Time, this would guarantee that you always
have the latest version of a document--at the cost of
the overhead of checking. But because the browser's do
not cache secured documents, this leads to a reload
every time.
Setting this to Once per session will avoid the problem,
and may lead to improvements in viewing other pages as
well. And if you ever want to force a reload of a page
before restarting the browser, you can do that with the
browser's reload/refresh button or command.
Choice 2: Saving to Local Disk
By saving the document to your local disk, you can
quickly access the document even if you're not connected
to the Internet. You can also place the file on a LAN
to enable access by many people.
Of course, by downloading the file to your local disk you then are
no longer sure to be reading the latest version of the document.
We do provide the date of update on the page listing the manuals. Since
your operating system will date stamp the file you download,
you can manually keep track of updates that way.
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