Obtaining and Viewing ACE/TAO Documents

All the documents describing ACE and TAO on my Web site are available in compressed, postscript format, i.e., "*.ps.gz". You can also download them in PDF format, i.e., "*.pdf", from the ACE+TAO anonymous ftp site. Eric S Rosenthal has donated a perl script that converts the 4-up handouts to 1-up handouts.

The compression scheme is GNU Zip, which you can get from the University of Texas. The PostScript files are printable on thousands of PostScript printers or viewable with PostScript previewing software.

Unfrotunately, PostScript files are not entirely portable and many software packages emit ncorrect PostScript that doesn't work with one printer or software package or another. If you have problems with one piece of software you might try another before giving up.

To view PostScript documents, you can:

  1. Send the PostScript file to a PostScript printer; or
  2. View the PostScript with PostScript viewer software; or
  3. Convert the PostScript file to PDF format which is then viewable with a PDF viewer. PDF versions of the ACE/TAO documents are available online. Please note that capitalization is important when you download these papers...

Tools to view PostScript can be found at the University of Wisconsin.

Browser Woes on Windows-based PCs

Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0/5.0 have problems downloading papers with "*.ps.gz" file type suffixes on Windows-based PCs. This double-extension is common on UNIX, but not handled well on platforms like Windows NT, Windows '95, and Windows '98.

Netscape Navigator is willing to transfer the files, but changes the extensions to "*_ps.ps". However, if you ``right-click'' or ``shift-click'' i.e., hold the shift key down while clicking in the normal manner, on the link referencing to the zip document, Netscape should download it as "*_ps.gz," i.e., it'll prepend the correct suffix. This should then work perfectly without further ado. If not, you can typically make this work by renaming the file to "*.ps.gz" and then using WinZip or GNU Zip on it.

In contrast, Internet Explorer 4.0 responds with a long waiting time followed by a dialog box that says "The download file is not available. This could be due to your Security or language settings or because the server was unable to retrieve the requested file." Likewise, Internet Explorer 5.0 downloads the files just fine, as blah.ps.gz, but the file is actually decompressed even though it is named *.gz. You can make this work by renaming the file to "*.ps".

The best fix is to use Netscape... Alternatively, you could install the service pack for Internet Explorer, which fixes this problem. Likewise, you might download GetRight, which can retrieve *.tar.gz files on Windows platforms. In addition, GetRight can reset up a broken download and continues where it stopped.

Back to Douglas C. Schmidt's home page.

Last modified 11:34:54 CDT 28 September 2006