Forms and large documents on our site are in Portable Document Format (PDF). To view them you'll need to have software installed on your computer that can read PDF files. There are several free software packages you can download to view PDF files, including Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader.

Blind and partially sighted users

You can get advice about how you can view PDF files if you are blind or partially sighted, including how to read PDFs using Acrobat Reader, on the Adobe Accessibility Resource Center website

Converting PDFs into text

PDFs can be converted back into normal web pages (html), or text, using Adobe's online PDF conversion website.

To use the conversion tool:

1. type, or copy and paste, the URL into the conversion form. The URL is the address of the PDF document such as www.york.gov.uk/index.pdf. You can copy this from the browser address bar which is at the top of the webpage.
2. select if you want to convert to html (so you get a web page) or text
3. you will also need to complete the rest of the form which asks you about why you want to convert and what type of computer you are using (this is usually Windows).

Unfortunately some documents are hard to interpret, such as diagrams and tables of statistics, and some formatting may be altered.