Most of the documents are in TIFF format or PDF format. The TIFF files are multipage and normally use group 4 compression. This format is an image format you can't search or copy text from the documents. The PDF files are in the Adobe portable document format. This format can either be text or images. Most of the documents are images since they were scanned from paper without trying to convert using optical character recognition (OCR). OCR tends to need a lot of hand editing to correct errors.

Most of the files from the site ftp://ftp.dbit.com are ASCII text files. They have the extension .doc but are not Word documents. They can be viewed with most any editor or word processor.

For viewing the TIFF files the windows TIFF viewer looks better on screen than the Acrobat reader if the TIFF viewer scale to gray option is selected. The TIFF files are also somewhat smaller than the PDF files. For printing the PDF may keep the text size closer to the original document.

Most of the viewer programs have an option to scale the documents to fit the page when printing. If the documents doesn't fit well on the page turn this option on. For acrobat if you have this option off when printing pages which are close to your paper size they will look better with larger margins. This option is normally on the print menu or the print options menu.

• To view portable document files with extension PDF use the Adobe PDF reader from Download page or Text only download page. This software is available for many different operating systems.

• To view TIFF files with extension tif or tiff:
  • One package that can do this under Windows 95 or later is the free "Imaging for Windows" from Eastman Software. Later versions of Windows 95/98/NT come with this software. Here's a direct link to the download page. Here's a link to the Eastman web site at http://www.eastmansoftware.com/products/ImagingPro for some information on the commercial version of this package.

  • Paint Shop Pro 5 from JASC Software can also load these documents. A multiple page document is read with each page coming up in a separate Paint Shop Pro window. While not optimal, this works, and Paint Shop Pro is a great application.

  • Are you a Mac user? If so, here's a link to Graphic Converter, a utility that will let you read these TIFF files, and optionally convert them to other formats, including PDF. This link was provided by Al Kossow, aek@spies.com.