Configuring External Viewers
In order to pass information on to the user, this Web Site makes extensive
use of files formatted for external viewers. These viewers can be
seperated into two groups: image viewers, such as Ghostview for Postscipt
files or Adobe Acrobat Reader for PDF files, and
application viewers, such as
Maple or Mathematica. The following documentation will provide links to
each of external viewers required for our Web Pages, as well as some advice
for configuring your Web Browser to use these viewers.
Image Viewers
All papers, reports and other resources available for download from our
site are available in two different image formats, as denoted by the
following icons:
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Postscript
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Adobe's Portable Document Format - PDF
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Free external viewer software for each of these file types
can be downloaded
from the following sites:
Instructions for configuring your Web Browser to automatically
download and
view images using your newly installed software are presented later on this
page.
Application Viewers
Much of the analytical modelling and education resources available on this
Web Site are in the form of Maple or Mathematica files. Maple and
Mathematica are computer algebra software capable of performing both
symbolic and numerical computations for a wide range of mathematical and
engineering problems. The different file types and versions will be
denoted by the following icons:
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Maple V Release 3
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Maple V Release 4
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Mathematica v.2.x
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Mathematica v.3.0
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Both Maple V R3 and Mathematica v.2.x files can be opened and executed by
their next versions;
however,
once a file has been
saved by either v.3.0 or R4,
it can no longer be read by the previous version (not backwards
compatible).
In order to make changes and execute the Maple or Mathematica worksheets
that you download from our site, you must have a licensed version of Maple
or Mathematica installed on your computer. However, both Maple and
Mathematica have free external viewer software available at the following
sites:
The Mathematica external viewer is a dedicated reader package for
Mathematica Notebooks; however, the Maple viewer is actually a demo of
their software, but it seems to work quite well as an external viewer for a
Web Browser.
Configuring Your Web Browser
The final step in using an external viewer is to configure your Web Browser
to automatically download the file and start the viewer when a particular
file type is requested. This is accomplished by creating an association in
your Web Browser for the particular file type extension. The following
pages describe this process
for the Windows (and perhaps Mac) versions of
each of the three most commonly used Web
Browsers:
Netscape Communicator 4.0
Netscape 2.0 and 3.0
Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 and 3.0
NCSA Mosaic 2.0
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Last updated August 18, 1997
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