Acrobat & Zip Files

Updated January 10, 2008

Acrobat PDF files and Zip files

Acrobat PDF^® Files—browsing and downloading

		What is Acrobat? Many of the documents available on NALC's website were created in Adobe Acrobat^® portable document format, or PDF^®. PDF files appear the same and print the same on any computer so long as the appropriate Acrobat Reader^® program is installed.
		Get the Acrobat Reader! The Acrobat Reader program is free and available for download from the Adobe Systems, Inc. website. Click the button at left to get it.

Browsing Acrobat PDF files online
To browse a PDF file while online, point your cursor at the link and click the left mouse button. Your Acrobat Reader will load inside your web browser so you can view the files. It takes a little time for the first couple of pages to load. After that new pages load more quickly.

Some PDF documents contain a lot of graphics—for example, Postal Record articles—so the files are large and browsing them online is impractical on a dial-up Internet connection. Download such large files to your own computer and view them locally (see below).

Details: Unless you have a broadband connection to the Internet, you can browse larger PDF files online only if (1) you have installed the Acrobat Reader and (2) your browser supports PDF byte-serving. Byte-serving enables your browser to download one page of a PDF file at a time and view it before the entire file has arrived. Many browsers support byte-serving—Internet Explorer (IE) 4 and above, Netscape 4, Netscape 6.1 and above (but not Netscape 6.0), Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera, and the IE browsers used by American Online (AOL) and CompuServe.

Downloading Acrobat PDF files
You can download an entire PDF file to your computer for quick viewing. Point your cursor at the file link, click the right mouse button and choose a Save option.

Zip Files—Downloading and decompressing
Some contract files are available for download in compressed Zip format. They have the filename extension *.zip.

Downloading Zip files
Right-click on the link and choose save.

Get an unzipping program
An unzipping program is needed to uncompress and open zipped files, such as elm16.zip. Many unzipping programs are available for download on the web, both freeware (e.g., ZIPfree 2000) and shareware (e.g., Winzip, PKZip, ZipMagic). In newer versions of Microsoft Windows^® (for example, XP and Vista), Zip files appear as compressed folders that Windows will decompress for you automatically, simply by double-clicking the Zip file.

Zipped multi-file PDFs
Some zipped PDF documents consist of more than one PDF file and some, such as the ELM, require a particular folder structure to ensure proper linking between files. When you unzip these files, a folder structure will be created with the PDF files in the appropriate folders. A readme.txt file tells which PDF contains the document's table of contents.