Q. I'm concerned when the file that the page [for the Xavier paper] lists as 906K occupies 16.2MB while compressed after downloading. The download link could be mislabeled, but I don't want to risk my only laptop until conferring with you. Is 16MB about the correct size for the downloaded zip file?
A. There are two errors in the file size as listed on the authors' page. The file, as compressed on the authors' web site, is 906,668 bytes, which is 885KB. Under the mistaken assumption that there are 1,000 bytes in a KB, it would round off to 907KB, rather than 906KB.
After it has been expanded it will be approximately 16MB (16,996,304 bytes).
If you are getting a value of 16.2MB after downloading the file, it must be expanded already.
Q. Also, is there freely available software for viewing postscript documents?
A. Yes, there are several free programs available. These include GhostView, GV, GSview, and MacGSview. There is probably one for whatever OS you happen to be running, including Linux, UNIX, Mac, OS/2, and VMS. (Yeah, Windows too.) These make use of something called GhostScript. GhostScript is an interpreter that was originally designed to handle the PostScript language (used by many laser printers). It has since be adapted to handle PDF as well. This means that some of the viewers made using GhostScript, such as GV, can also view PDF files. (So, you can use GV rather than Acrobat Reader, for example.) See <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/> for all of this software and more information on using it.
Another option is to use a program such as Adobe Acrobat Distiller or freeware such as ps2pdf (which is also built on GhostScript) to convert the PostScript file to PDF. (For more details on ps2pdf, see, for example, <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/6.01/Ps2pdf.htm>.) One nice thing about going this route is that the PDF file generally is smaller than the PostScript file, sometimes by a lot. In fact, in this case, the PDF is significantly smaller than the compressed PostScript - only 704KB. The down side of this is that, depending on the font used in the PostScript file, the PDF may look poor if viewed in some PDF viewers, such as Acrobat Reader. (This paper provides a good example of this.)
Perhaps the best option is to combine the previous two. Convert the PostScript to PDF with ps2pdf, then view the PDF with GV. It will be a small file and it will look good on your screen!
By the way, the reason I have spent this much time on this answer is that researchers were making electronic copies of their papers available to one another using PostScript (and ftp) long before such things as PDF (and http) were invented. So, while many researchers now use PDF to distribute their papers (using the web), there are still an awful lot of good papers out there in PostScript that you should know how to access.