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:

Postscript
Adobe's Portable Document Format - PDF
Free external viewer software for each of these file types can be downloaded from the following sites:

Ghostview v.2.1
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/index.html

Adobe Acrobat Reader
http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html

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:

Maple V Release 3
Maple V Release 4
Mathematica v.2.x
Mathematica v.3.0
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:

Maple V R4 Demo
http://www.maplesoft.com/demos/documents/maplev.html

Mathematica Math Reader
http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/mathreader.html

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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