In order to seamlessly download and view documents from arXiv, you may have to configure your web browser. It must be told what types of files to expect and what to do with them when it gets them. In some cases, you may need to know the appropriate MIME types delivered by arXiv.
Note that PostScript, DVI, and source files are delivered in gzip compressed format (a standard compression method). Submissions consisting of several files are bundled together in a single tar file before being gzipped. Downloaded PS, DVI, and source files must therefore first be gunzipped, and then possibly untarred. See our unpacking notes for more information.
Depending on how your web browser is configured, it may uncompress the downloaded file(s) automatically. This may present a problem if the browser does not then properly rename the formerly gunzipped file. In these cases, users will complain that the downloaded file will not gunzip. See Downloaded .gz Files that are not Gzipped for a explanation of the problem.
As stated above, arXiv delivers PostScript in gzipped format. We sometimes receive complaints that the compressed PostScript articles do not uncompress, or that is, it seems they do not, as the downloaded files can be viewed unproblematically if first saved to disk. See Downloaded .gz Files that are not Gzipped for a explanation of the problem.
There are many standard programs available to view PostScript documents.
We highly recommend the Ghostscript suite of tools, which is freely
available at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost for most common operating
systems. After installation, you will want to assign the PostScript MIME
type with the appropriate viewer either via a download wizard (prompts
which program you'd like to associate with this filetype at download
time) or through the appropriate menu option (e.g.,
Edit->Preferences->Downloads in Firefox).
The most common programs used to view PDF are:
- Adobe's free Acrobat Reader (also known as "acroread" on Linux/Unix systems), available on most platforms
- Apple's Preview, which comes preinstalled on Mac systems and preconfigured in the Safari browser
- xpdf, an open source viewer freely available for Linux/Unix platforms
After installation, you will want to assign the PDF MIME type with the
appropriate viewer either via a download wizard (prompts which program
you'd like to associate with this filetype at download time) or through
the appropriate menu option (e.g., Edit->Preferences->Downloads in
Firefox).
The source files for a paper are sent as a single compressed file. For papers without figures, this file is just the gzipped TeX/LaTeX source file. If the paper has several parts (e.g., LaTeX plus multiple figures), they will be bundled together in a single gzipped tar file for downloading. See our unpacking notes.
Most Unix/Linux web browsers will uncompress gzipped files but not untar them. Thus for multi-part files you need to use the tar command to unpack individual TeX and PostScript files from the single file you download. On Windows and Macintosh you will probably need to both uncompress and untar, because browsers on these platforms typically will not uncompress automatically.
Note: You can recognize a tar file by the binary headers (^@ characters) at the top of the file, followed by ordinary text. For info on unpacking tar files, see our unpacking help page.