Occasional papers

There are some known faults when trying to download or view pdfs in certain browsers.

Chrome

If you have a problem when using Chrome, try the following:
type “Chrome:plugins” into the Chrome browser address bar. You should now see a list of “plug-ins”. Scroll down to “Chrome pdf viewer” (about 6th one down) and disable it.
Then check that you’ve got the latest version of Adobe – if you scroll down a bit further, you should see “Adobe reader”. Check to see whether it has “Download Critical Security update” next to it, and if so, click to update.

See also: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/142056?hl=en-GB

Firefox

Using Firefox generally works but if you do happen to encounter problems, the most common issue is slightly different to the one encountered with Chrome. While in Chrome, the document won’t open or download at all, in Firefox, it usually does, but in Firefox’s latest version, it opens the document in its own viewer which users are reporting as not “fit for purpose”: it displays/prints wrong typefaces with bad character spacing, sometimes displays pages as completely blank, prints some colours and not others etc. To fix this, try the following:
Type “about:config” in your Firefox browser address bar.
Enter “pdf” into the search box.
This will return a number of files with “pdf” in the title. Select “pdfjs.disabled” and change the word “false” in the column headed “values” to “true”. This has the effect of disabling the viewer function and enabling you to download the pdf which you can then open in Adobe.