Downloading Painfully Slow?

[Ogrork the Mighty]

Why does WotC force us to open Dragon and Dungeon in pdf? It is such a royal pain in the butt. I just want to download it, not open it. I've spent the past 15 minutes trying to download one issue and have now given up in frustration.

ARGH!!!

 

[justanobody]

Due to the struture of the site and the way their content management system (CMS) works, there is an interim page between the link and the downloads that checks to see if you are a subscriber. Due to this you must jump through some hoops in order to be able to download a PDf from their site when behind the subscription firewall.

WotC feels it better to make you make changes to your browser just to use their service, rather than make changes to their server to better serve everyone.

In order to save a PDF you have a few options depending on your browser.

*Disable PDF viewing for the browser when visting DDI.
*Uninstall any BHOs from your browser that automatically open PDF files.
*Uninstall any PDF viewing software until after you have downloaded the PDf you want and reinstall it.
*Unassociate PDF files with your PDF viewer so your OS does not know what to do with them and ask/promtps for an action to take when it comes across them

For anything else you will have to contact WotC directly about their download.asp file/page that is causing you problems.

 

[pedr]

There's an odd workaround that I heard about on the WotC boards and has worked for me.

While logged into D&D Insider, right click on the link to the file you want to download. Choose the save/download option (wording browser dependent). You'll get a dialog box offering to save download.asp, which obviously you don't want. Click cancel. Right click on the link to the file again, and choose save/download. Now you should get a dialog box offering to save {filename}.pdf which you do want. Choose where to save it, and tell it to download. This should do exactly what it claims it's doing, leaving you with a .pdf file saved to your chosen location.

Why this works, I have no idea, and it may not always work for whatever reason, but it's better than the alternatives!

 

[Asmor]

Let me preface this by saying: WotC should make it easier to download PDFs. There's no reason it should be so difficult for most people.

That said, the real problem here is PDF-browser integration, which is just a freaking terrible, horrible, awful idea, and whichever person at Adobe first came up with the idea of an Internet Explorer or Netscape plugin to view PDFs in the browser should be shot*.

Thankfully, I don't have this problem in the first place; I use a different reader (FoxIt reader) which I find significantly faster than Adobe's reader (this is compared to versions 6 through 8; I've heard 9 is actually quite speedy, but haven't tried it). FoxIt doesn't integrate with the browser at all, which is wonderful, so I just get prompted to save or open the file whenever I click a link to a PDF.

*Shot with a camera, I mean, and then that picture put up on a wall of people with really stupid, annoying ideas that unfortunately caught on. I don't actually advocate killing the guy for this...

 

[Fallen Seraph]

*Shrugs shoulders* I personally haven't had any problems, at the most it takes a couple seconds to completely load the PDF and then yeah can save it like normal.

I use Firefox 3 for my browser and normal Adobe reader.

 

[Shroomy]

*Shrugs shoulders* I personally haven't had any problems, at the most it takes a couple seconds to completely load the PDF and then yeah can save it like normal.

I use Firefox 3 for my browser and normal Adobe reader.

I'm using IE 7 and I haven't had any problems downloading the PDFs either.

 

[Kesh]

Yeah, I think the big difference has to do with your download speeds. For me, it's not that bad. If you're on dialup, or even a slower broadband connection, it could be a real pain.

 

[Piratecat]

There are one or two issues that crash my browser every time, and which I still haven't downloaded. There is one issue that is dramatically larger than any other issue.

From my perspective, it needs a little bit of love.

 

[mattdm]

I think there's a firefox plugin which lets you decide whether to save a pdf or show it in acrobat reader.

I sidestep this problem by having evince (a pdf reader) installed but no browser plugin. I almost NEVER want to look at a PDF as if it were a web page.

So, I never really thought about it — but, it does bring up another argument against the "online for a month only" pricing scheme. If most non-technical users basically get only a way to view the file online in their browser and aren't presented with an easy way to save the file, they're going to be punished.

 

[justanobody]

I think there's a firefox plugin which lets you decide whether to save a pdf or show it in acrobat reader.

It should be in Tools>options>applications for firefox. Just set to "prompt" or "save to disk" for Adobe Acrobat Document settings. No plugin should be needed at all, it will ask you everytime, or save PDF to your drive everytime you try to access or view one from a website.

This doesn't help IE users or any user of any other browser however.