Technical Help

PDF - Problems and Solutions

It is not always possible to find the human resources to provide documents and other resources in html. Therefore, many of the documents posted on our web site, particularly the large ones or ones with large amounts of specialised formatting, are saved in pdf format. To open, view, print or download these documents, you will need to have the Adobe Acrobat Reader software - available free from the Adobe Web site [http://www.adobe.com].

Basically, the accepted Internet standard for providing the types of documents mentioned above within the Uniting Church and. for that matter, the WWW, has become PDF. In some circumstances we may also provide Microsoft Office documents, or other original formatted works, but only when we deem it as necessary (i.e. perhaps a liturgy that we believe will be cut and pasted into another service - Microsoft Office provides greater ease of editing than Adobe Acrobat Reader). Larger documents will sometimes be compressed to speed up the download process.

In some circumstances we may be able to provide you with an alternative copy of the document in another format - please ask

pdf files are marked with a - you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader or similar

doc files are marked with a - you will need Microsoft Word or similar

compressed files are marked with a - you will need Winzip or StuffIt or similar

self extracting files are marked with a - these work on PCs only, you do not need any special software

Problems

In most cases these pdf files will download without a problem. In some cases, however, documents do not open correctly. Common problems include blanks document pages and printer malfunction. This is a widely reported problem detailed on both the Microsoft and Adobe web sites.

Try one of the quick solutions before reading on!

If you can more-often-than-not view pdfs on the Internet without a problem, the most likely cause of the problem is one or more of the following:

If this is your first time trying to access a pdf file or you always have problems downloading .pdf files,
the problem may be associated with the above, but you may also have one or more of the following problems

Possible quick solutions

Before taking your computer apart or installing new software, first try one of the following:

• Try to re-open the document by refreshing/reloading the page (one of the buttons on your top menu bar - located near the home and stop button)

OR

• Download the document directly to your computer, thus bypassing the in-window function that often causes the faults relating to slow connection/busy servers/large documents.
  1. Right click (shift-click for Macs) on the link to the PDF document you need.
  2. Select "Save Target As" , "Save Link As." or something similar in your browser
  3. Save the document to your desktop or if you want to save to another location take note where you are saving it.
  4. The document may still take some time to download. Once it has finished downloading, double click on document icon or Open Adobe Acrobat Reader > open file.

If one of these two methods does not work, you will have to get the problem fixed - first try downloading the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. In the meantime, feel free to email us a request for the document you are having problems with, or call Communications on +612 8267 4227

Web sites relating to this topic

Trouble shooting download problems on the Adobe site
http://www.adobe.com/support/techguides/acrobat/rdrdwnld/main.html

Microsoft Windows and Adobe plug in information:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q177321

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