Help on Displaying Physics Papers

How to display "gzipped tar-balls of postscript" physics can be, frankly, confusing!

There are several problems which may occur:

1.) You click on a file, but your browser (Netscape, IE, whatever) complains that it has no idea what you've just clicked on (hehe).  This is the most frequent problem.  If this is your case, then read the physics eprint help pages which have the most detailed help available.  Before surfing to these pages, however, you might want to consider the following two scenarios:

1a.) You're on a PC (using Windows, not Linux).  You're probably going to need two files.  Firstly, check around on your PC for a file called "ghostview", or "gsview32.exe", or something like that.  It's for examining files written in PostScript format, and usually in the C:\GSTOOLS directory somewhere.  If you don't have it, you can install it from the physics eprint help pages, and it's free, but beware: installation is kind of a mess, so it's not really worth the trouble to install it unless you plan to do this sort of thing often.  Secondly, you'll need WinZip, which is extremely easy to install, and which you should have already had anyways.

1b.)  You're on a UNIX-like system (including Linux, SunOS, Ultrix, whatever).  Firstly, make sure that somebody's installed the program "ghostview" or "gv", simply by typing them in at a shell prompt (they could be in /usr/local/bin/gv, /usr/local/bin/ghostview, or something like that).  If you don't have them, somebody's going to have to install them on your system.  Secondly, you'll also need the tool gunzip (perhaps in /usr/local/bin/gunzip).  Again, if you don't have that either, somebody will have to install it.  Check the physics eprint help pages for more help in these cases.

2.) Problems printing.  Here at the CBPF, we have a rather touchy laserprinter on the 3rd floor.  Some of the documents here have been (accidentally) saved in "Letter" format, rather than "A4", which our printer doesn't like.  To print these files: remove (yes, strange, isn't it?) the "Letter" tray from the printer, and leave only the "A4" tray in it, filled with A4 paper.  Then print.  Don't even try to ask me why only this combination works!  :)