Electronic Media Viewers
Revised: May 7, 2007
Most documents available from the Utah Division of Water Rights Imaging System
are scanned as black and white single bit compressed TIF style image
(CCITT Group IV) files. An external or plugin viewer is required
to view them with WWW Browsers.
Microsoft Operating Systems and Tiff Viewers
A "tiff" viewer has been part of the
Microsoft operating system since Windows 95. In most cases it has already
been installed as part of the base operating system. Check to see if it is
installed by going to CONTROL PANEL, ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS, Select WINDOWS SETUP
tab, select ACCESSORIES and press the DETAILS button. An application called
Imaging should be displayed as a component with a check box marked
indicating it is installed. If the box isn't Checked, Check the box and install
it.
Early versions of Windows 95 or NT did not include the component so you will
need to download and install it. Instructions can be found in
knowledgebase article 140980 provided by Microsoft.
All newer versions of the MS Windows operating systems include the component
on the installation CD so it can be installed directly from the control panel.
The Windows XP "fax and image viewer" which displays TIFF images is built
into the OS. You do not need to install it.
You may also install the AlternaTIFF viewer at this link
Problems with TIFF Viewers
There are a couple of common problems associated with TIFF viewers. First is software
which installs itself as being able to read TIFF files but lacks the
sophistication to read compressed images and/or the tools to present the
data in a usable way. The two common applications which cause this problem
are QUICKTIME and MGI PHOTOSUITE. If you have either of these applications
installed we suggest you go to the CONTROL PANEL and remove them. Graphics
software provided with some digital cameras can be problematic. The major
symptom of a conflicting application is the suprise startup of an application
when you are trying to view an image document.
Our recomended solution for all application conflicts is
to uninstall, or, if you are an advanced user, modify the registry so the application
doesn't associate with TIFF images.
QUICKTIME includes a
plugin viewer for the www browser which is installed but doesn't advertise it's
presence. It can be identified by a blue circle appearing for a moment
in the viewer window. If you choose to un-install QUICKTIME you must shut down
the web browser before un-installing and select the "remove all" option
when the application prompts to remove the application.
The latest version of QUICKTIME (version 6.5) has a feature which will
allow you to specify which image types should be associated with the application.
If you want QUICKTIME to remain on your system
install the latest version,
then configure it to not associate with TIFF still images. You configure it
by right clicking the Quicktime Icon on the taskbar, select "Quicktime Preferences"
select "File Type Associations" from the pulldown menu, select the "File Types"
button, click on the "+" sign to the left of "Images - Still image files", uncheck
the box for "TIFF image file" and hit the "Apply" button.
Another problem which is experienced frequently is actually a Microsoft
distributed "feature".
Microsoft patches to the WIN9x, NT and 2000 operating systems distributed in
2002 broke the viewer operation. This is discussed in
Microsoft Article 325192. A workaround was provided in
Microsoft
Article 319829.
If the www browser has been displaying images but suddenly stops working you
might want to try removing cached temporary internet files. We have experienced
incidents where Microsoft IE does not clean up the temporary files correctly
when they are opened by an external application like a TIFF viewer.
Eventually, the cache limit is reached and the browser won't allow additional
files to download. You can remove these files by selecting from the pulldown
menu at the top of Internet Explorer "Tools", "Internet Options", and hitting the
"Delete Files" button. You can hit the "Settings" button and change the
setting to "Every visit to the page" to reduce the potential for this problem.
Downloading and/or printing multiple TIFF images
The tools on our website are designed for online viewing of TIFF images.
Copying all the documents in a folder and/or printing them can be very
tedious. If you want to do that regularly you may want to consider using
the following procedure:
Downloading The Images
- Create a temporary folder in which to download the images. Keep the path name
simple since you will need to use it several times in the process. I
suggest C:\tmpdocs. NOTE: Don't use a name/path with embedded
spaces or other special characters.
- Download a program called WGET.
The current version of the program is more sophisticated than needed for
our use. You can download version 1.5 here WGET.EXE
which does not require installation.
This program is a command line utility which will download data from a
website into files on your machine. Download the program directly into
the temporary directory you created above.
- Bring up the scanned document listing for a water right or publication you
wish to download from the water rights website. Right click on the page and select
the "view source" option. A second window will open which displays the
source of the page in the notepad editor. Edit the source to remove
all of the stuff at the top of the page down to where the documents
are listed (you will see a column of numbers starting with 1, which is the
beginning of the document links). Do the same at the bottom of the page.
Save the edited text in the temporary folder you created above by hitting
"file", "save as", navigating to the temporary folder and naming the file
with a recognizable name like "download.txt".
- Use the Run command under the start menu to download the documents
you have selected. If you used the suggested naming above the command
to use in Open after selecting Start, Run is
c:\tmpdocs\wget -i download.txt.
The WGET program may take several minutes to
download the files depending on the speed of your internet connection
and the number of files being downloaded. Status of the process is
displayed in the command prompt window as the download occurs.
Alternate Methods to Download Images
"Download Manager" applications are available which can be installed with
web browsers. Using one of these applications you simply download
all the links from the scanned documents page (except header and footer
info) into an empty directory or folder. I suggest c:\tmpdocs.
The FIREFOX web browser has an excellent
free extension called DownThemAll!
which has been tested and works very well. Useful download managers are
those which don't take over your browsing process but can easily select
links from a page to download. Use a web search for "download managers"
to identify commercial products available.
You can also use http://waterrights.utah.gov/cgi-bin/docbare.exe?Folder=wrnum#
to create a list of documents to download (this application does not
generate other links, just links to documents). It can be used in
conjunction with wget to download a template file which does not need
to be edited before using the template file to download images in the folder.
DOCBARE can also be used to create local links to documents organized
as a folder. Add &Local=YES to the end of the URL above to
create a web page listing of documents with links which are at the local
machine level (there is no path to documents, just the file name).
Printing
- Open MY COMPUTER and navigate into the folder containing the scanned
documents (c:\tmpdocs). Right Click on the first file and select "print".
- Follow the print wizard until it displays thumbnails of the images to
to be printed. Select Select All and continue with the printing wizard
until printing is complete.
- Close the print wizard and delete the temporary folder (c:\tmpdocs).
Alternate Printing - Create PDF file of scanned documents
If you have Adobe Acrobat (not just the reader but the full product) you
can import TIFF images into a single PDF file for viewing or printing.
It is easy to do because you can select multiple images to import. It is
a very flexible solution since there are simple controls to print one or more
pages from an ACROBAT (pdf) file.
Adobe Acrobat
Some documents, particularly printable forms require the
Adobe
Acrobat Reader. Forms designated with (online editing) can be
filled out online before being printed for delivery to the Division of Water
Rights. This feature requires Acrobat 3.0 or higher. To enter information
on a form click in the area the information is to be entered and type in the
information. Note: Sometimes the information won't appear in the field
until you click outside the entry area.
Sound Files
Sound bytes (recordings) are MP3 files and require a
special player and hardware (a sound card and speakers). Several
MP3 audio players are available on the Internet.
Microsoft's
latest media player product works well on windows platforms.
JAVA Enabled Pages (Mapserver)
The Mapserver which displays interactive maps requires the
Java Runtime Environment
available for free from Sun Microsystems. Follow the link to download and
install the software. You will get a red X in the map window or a black
map window if the component isn't functioning or is not installed.