Help Viewing PDFs

All the documents you can download from this website are Portable Document Format files. To view these files you need to have a free programme called Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. This programme is already on many home computer but if you do not have it you can download it from the Adobe Website by clicking on the link below

Saving documents to your computer
If you have a PC, right-click on the link to the document. If you use an Apple Mac, hold down the mouse button over the link. In both cases, a popup menu will then appear. Scroll down the menu and click on ‘Save target as’. You will then be asked to choose a folder on your computer where you can save the document.

Problems
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.

For more information about problems with using Adobe Acrobat Reader click here to go to the Adobe Support pages.

Searching within a PDF
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.