[vox-tech] browser and mimetypes (I think)

[Troy Arnold]

On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 10:56:54AM -0400, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> There's an URL to a pdf download of an article published by Optics Letters.
> I don't think anyone can access this because I'm using a Princeton
> University proxy (and Princeton has a subscription to this journal), but the
> URL is:
> 
>    http://ol.osa.org/ViewMedia.cfm?id=68550&seq=0
> 
> It doesn't look like a pdf.  I tried and tried to get the pdf to download
> and display on Firefox on Linux.  I think perhaps it downloads OK but
> Firefox doesn't know what to do with it, since it's a "cfm" file, whatever
> that is, not a pdf file.

'cfm' probably means it's a Cold Fusion document, but that's irrelevant
to your problem, I think.  The problem likely lies with what
content-type headers the document is spitting out before it delivers the
actual pdf.

A couple of things to try:
1) HEAD the document and see what headers are being sent.  Then, fiddle
   with Firefox until it does "the right thing" when it see's those
   headers.  In Debian, HEAD is part of Perl's LWP package (libwww-perl)
   As an aside, it includes other handy tools such as, GET and POST.

2) Check your browser cache for an appropriately sized file and
   mv/rename it to .pdf.  Note, that there may be extraneous stuff
   before the actual pdf data.  The PDF's I've looked at all start with
   the string "%PDF-n.n" where 'n' appears to be a version number.
   
2) try something like wget or curl and see if they're able to download
   the document directly.

Hope that at least provides some ideas for you to try.

-troy