Created
October 16, 2014 07:57
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show_temp.pl on Pacer site instead of PDF
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| A lot of people are not using Adobe-brand PDF software on their Windows computers. Without the proper pre-configuration their software may not open PDFs unless they have a ".pdf" extension. I was using Nuance PDF Converter Professional to access the Pacer court web site and every time I would try to download the file I would have to rename the show_temp.pl file to show_temp.pdf before I could get it to open. I discovered that the Pacer web site using a Perl (.pl) script to serve the file, but the script does not redirect to a new URL with a .pdf extension but rather serves the data up on the fly with the MIME type set to "application/pdf". For some reason the installation of PDF Converter that I was using did not set this MIME type upon installation. | |
| The path in the registry to set the application/pdf MIME type is HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Content Type\application/pdf. I had to create the "application/pdf" subkey, add a string named "Extension" and set its value to ".pdf". |
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Does the string value need to be
".pdf"
or
.pdf
?
I've tried it both ways and it doesn't seem to be working.
What did work for me was changing the firefox options to have PDFs open in the browser; I could then open and download the PDF.
Another option is to select multiple documents for download within PACER, which it then handily puts into a compressed file for local extraction.
Great tip, though - saved me loads of time figuring out what was going wrong!