Updated Thursday, July 15, 2004
This page is prepared by Bent E. Petersen. Comments about Adobe and Microsoft products found here reflect my personal opinions and experiences only and are in no way associated with Oregon State University. In spite of any possibly negative comments I might make let me make clear that I am grateful to Adobe Systems Incorporated for making Acrobat Reader freely available. It is a great product.
Adobe Acrobat is a great way to present mathematics on the Web. One can hope that eventually the HTML standard, or its replacements, will include the needs of science and mathematics, but in the meantime Acrobat is what we have, and its use is not without some problems.
If you do have problems using any of my PDF files please let me know, petersen@math.oregonstate.edu . Even better if you have solutions to problems, then let me know.
I have seen this error when using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 on an NT 4.0 system. The downloaded file sometimes appears to be truncated. Cleaning out Internet Explorer's cache does not help.
Other systems (for example Konqueror on Linux) have no problem downloading and displaying the problem file.
Sometimes when the Acrobat Reader MSIE plugin loads a PDF file MSIE will announce "Done" but the screen remains blank..This problem seems to be a browser problem and not an Acrobat problem.
A simple "solution" is to right-click (in Windows MSIE) to download the PDF files you are interested in and then view them later by using Acrobat (Reader or Exchange) as an application rather than as a plug-in. Alternately you can try using the Ghostview GhostScript duo - recent versions will display PDF files.
The problem may be caused by an overly restrictive internet security zone setting in MSIE. In that case a permanent fix is easy, though perhaps not acceptable. See the Knowledge Base article Q177321.
The problem may be caused by a problem in MSIE that was fixed in MSIE 5.01. See the Knowledge Base article Q247663.
The problem may be caused by MSIE attempting inappropriately to obtain the PDF file from its cache. This problem was fixed in MSIE 5.5. See the Knowledge Base article Q253213.
A "permanent solution" is to disconnect the Acrobat Reader plugin and to configure your Internet Explorer browser to run Acrobat Reader as a helper application rather than as a plugin. To do this first shutdown Internet Explorer. Then start up Acrobat Reader and from the menu bar select
File / Preferences / General
and uncheck "Web Browser Integration." Afterwards, the first time you select a PDF file in MSIE you will encounter a dialog box.In the dialog box select "Open this file from its current location," and check "Don't ask me again for files of this type" (or whatever the exact wording is). Next time you access a PDF file in MSIE it will be displayed in a separate Window without any nuisance dialog box opening.
In files prepared using the Postscript versions of the TeX Computer Modern fonts one sometimes sees missing upper case gammas. The upper case gammas are missing from both the screen image and the printout. One solution (for the file preparer) is to use a different font for the Greek letter symbols. I found using the LaTeX command (in a package file)
\DeclareMathAlphabet{\mathgreek}{U}{psy}{m}{n}
to install the Adobe (or URW) Postscript Symbol font and then redefining the standard macros, for example,
\renewcommand{\Delta}{\mathgreek{D}}
\newcommand{\Epsilon}{\mathgreek{E}}
\renewcommand{\Phi}{\mathgreek{F}}
\renewcommand{\Gamma}{\mathgreek{G}}
so the new font is used, fixes the problem. (Note psy is the Adobe symbol font. Even if you do not have the Adobe psy font, this may work since your TeX package may substitute the free URW symbol font.) There is more to do of course - the font also has to be introduced to dvips through a suitable map file and a metric file has to be made for TeX to use.
These commands (and the remaining ones) can be put in the LaTeX package file that one constructs to declare the new font. Not all the upper case Greek letters are defined in standard LaTeX, so one has to use the \newcommand, rather than \renewcommand. in those cases (as in Epsilon above). It is best to define all the letters for visual consistency, even the ones that are similar to the corresponding characters in the Latin alphabets.
The URW Postscript Symbol font is distributed with Ghostscript and with some TeX distributions. It is similar to the Adobe Symbol font. It fits in very nicely with the Computer Modern fonts.
The problem of many missing characters is one that the end user has some control over. When a file using Postscript fonts other than the basic Adobe fonts is prepared, the careful preparer will ensure that the fonts (or the required subsets) are embedded in the file. If not, then Acrobat will do its best to create suitable instances from one of two multiple master fonts (AdobeSerifMM and AdobeSansMM) on the fly - these fonts and the technology to adjust their metrics are built-in to Acrobat Reader. While the results are frequently much better than one would expect, the risk of getting incorrect symbols in technical documents is not acceptable. It is safest to embed any personal favorites or specialized fonts.
When Acrobat Reader or Exchange is run as a plug-in under a Web browser, the first such document that you look at may be fine, but the second one may be missing many characters. The problem appears to be that you are not running a fresh instance of Acrobat Reader (or Exchange) for the second and subsequent documents, and perhaps some internal font table fills up. The fix is simple (in Internet Explorer under Windows 95/NT):
A simpler solution if you are using your own PC is to right-click (under Windows) to download the PDF files you are interested in and then view them later by using Acrobat (Reader or Exchange) as an application rather than as a plug-in. If you still have problems then start a fresh copy of Acrobat for each file. Alternately you can try using the Ghostview-GhostScript duo - recent versions will display PDF files.
Apr 27 1999 - This problem does not seem to occur with Acrobat 4.0.
Acrobat 4.0 may display some files containing mathematics correctly on the screen, but print the files incorrectly. Multiline symbols such as the parentheses on matrices may have pieces missing or incorrectly aligned when type 1 fonts (Postscript) are used. The problem may be printer driver related.
The symbols which are incorrectly printed all come from the TeX symbol font cmex10.pfb. One way to prevent the problem (when creating PDF files starting from TeX source) is to comment-out cmex10.pfb in the dvips font file cmfonts.map (or wherever it occurs). Dvips will then insert bit-mapped images for the cmex10 characters in its Postscript output. When the Postscript file is run through Acrobat Distiller the bit-map images will be embedded as a type 3 font. It will look a bit unpleasant on the screen but will print fine. Note only the symbols constructed from cmex10 characters will be affected.