When download links do not work properly

The download links in this site contain additional material that are designed to be downloaded to your hard disk. There is only a limited number of content types and the following should happen if your web browser is set up properly:

File suffix	Action
pdb	The file is downloaded to a temporary location on your hard disk and a PDB viewing application is called to render the coordinates. The downloaded file has the proper document icon for your PDB viewing application.
pdb.gz	The file is downloaded to a temporary location on your hard disk and expanded. The expanded file is then passed to a PDB viewing application for rendering.
tar.gz	You are prompted to save the file to your hard disk. Your browser should automatically decompress the file and you will end up with a tar file (with only a .tar file suffix).
pdf	The file is downloaded to a temporary location on your hard disk and a PDF viewer or editor is called to render the file. The downloaded file has a proper PDF document icon.

The temporary location on your hard disk is usually the desktop or home directory; on UNIX systems it may also be your temporary directory (/tmp or /var/tmp). The temporary files should be removed when you quit the web browser. Therefore, if you wish to keep the files move them to another directory or rename them before you quit the browser. This is a bit more difficult on UNIX systems as the temporary files are often given cryptic names; obtain a listing of your files in the temporary directory before and after the download and check the time stamps on the files.

MIME Type	Suffixes	Handled by
chemical/x-pdb	pdb	Application: any PDB viewer, e.g. RasMol, RasMac, [*]
application/pdf	pdf	Application: Acrobat Reader or Exchange or acroread or acroread.exe. Alternatively, use the Acrobat Reader plugin. [+]
application/gzip	gz	Internally by your browser if possible. Otherwise Application: gzip or MacGzip. [+]
application/x-tar	tar	Save to Disk [+]

[*] On the Macromolecular Modeling Computers the application setting should be "rasmol %s"; [+] you should stick to the default settings made by the browser.

You should let the browser expand compressed file internally whenever possible. For less capable web browsers you have to nominate an application to do this; then compressed PDB files will be passed to the expansion program and the expanded file is not passed on to the PDB viewer. You may have to convert the end-of-line code (this is easily done with free utilities, e.g. BBEdit Lite). The corrected file can then be dragged on the PDB viewer application to be opened.

You can always force a download to your hard disk by clicking on the link with the rightmost button (on the Macintosh: control-click or hold down the mouse button for a moment) and from the pop-up menu, select Save Link As...

tar -xof whatever.tar

To extract a compressed tar file named whatever.tar.gz, type the following commands:

gzcat whatever.tar.gz | tar -xof -