Trouble Viewing These Pages?
Copyright © 2003–2011 by Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems
Copyright © 2003–2011 by Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems
Summary: Most people have no problem at all viewing these pages, which are generally designed to be accessible to any person with any browser. However, people who do report problems generally have two main types: bad formatting and garbage characters. This page tells you how to deal with both, starting with the easy one.
Contents:
This Web site uses the text size specified in your browser for paragraph text. If you need help adjusting your browser’s text size, please visit Stephen Poley’s Adjusting Text Size in Your Browser (accessed 2009-12-28).
If you see these pages in really boring fashion — everything left justified including headings, no color at all except links, and so forth — then your browser does not support CSS style sheets (version 3 or lower browsers), or its support of CSS is so buggy that I have hidden the style sheets from it (version 4 browsers) — trying to code around MSIE 4.x and NN 4.x CSS bugs is a nightmare.
You do not need to upgrade your browser! The content should still be accessible to everyone in any browser, even if the formatting is not. If you do wish to enrich your browsing experience on most sites, I have a recommendation, but it’s in no way a requirement.
One other possibility, if you have a version 5 or later browser but you’re not seeing any of the styles, is that your user settings have disabled style sheets. If that is the case, you might want to re-enable style sheet support in your browser’s user settings.
MS Internet Explorer 6 and even IE7 continue in Microsoft’s tradition of buggy browsers with buggy CSS support, so you may see some styling problems. If you’re constrained to use IE, at least make sure you have the latest version — and keep up to date on your security patches.
If you like your version of MSIE and don’t want to consider an additional browser, you should still be able to see most of the content of the pages. If this is an issue for you, you may want to use one of the College computers to view or print the pages in question.
These pages use standard Web characters (Unicode) for mathematical symbols like less than or equal to (≤), pi (π), minus (−), alpha (α), theta (θ), f-prime (f′), square root (√), infinity (∞), and y-hat (ŷ). Even if you’re still using Windows 95 and a 4.x-level browser, you should be able to view all the characters used on these pages. It’s just a matter of configuring Windows and your browser properly, and perhaps getting hold of a suitable (free) font, as explained below.
Two pages let you test your browser with a variety of characters:
If you’re running Windows 95 or Windows 98, multilanguage support (support for characters not on your keyboard) probably was not enabled at installation time. You should follow Microsoft’s instructions for enabling multilanguage support (accessed 2009-12-28).
After following those instructions, flush your browser cache and try viewing this page again. If the Unicode characters now appear, you’re all set. Otherwise, proceed to setting your browser preferences.
The following instructions tell you how to tell your browser how to use a suitable font, if you’ve got one. Some browser versions will actually determine which installed fonts are suitable and offer only those as a selection when you follow the instructions below. If you don’t have a suitable font, please follow the instructions below to get one.
One alternative to setting preferences on your existing browser is to install Mozilla Firefox as a secondary browser. If you have any suitable font installed on your computer, Firefox will usually access characters from it when necessary, with no need for you to select it in the preferences screens. But I should emphasize that this is just one alternative — you can get the job done in your existing browser.
Alan Wood has instructions for specific browsers at Unicode and Multilingual Browsers (accessed 2009-12-28).
Alan Flavell has specific instructions for a number of browser versions (not all the same ones) at I18n — Browsers and fonts (accessed 2009-12-28). Scroll down to “Font configuration per browser”.
First check whether you already have a suitable font. From Control Panel, select Fonts. A font that’s bigger than about 150 KB most likely contains the Unicode characters you’ll need to view math pages. Here are some possibilities, though other fonts of the same type would also be suitable:
While it’s nice to have all three, the one that matters is the one you use for viewing page text, most likely a sans-serif or serif font. These pages occasionally display pi or theta in a monospace font, as part of TI-83 instructions, but you’ll be able to pick that up from context.
If you’ve already got the necessary fonts, you can configure your existing browser to use them.
If you don’t have suitable fonts already, you can download good ones from the Web for free. (They are offered for free; I wouldn’t suggest piracy.) The simplest thing probably is to see Alan Flavell’s I18n — Browsers and fonts (accessed 2009-12-28) and scroll down to “MS Web Fonts Pack”.
If you’re really into fonts, you can delve into this subject more deeply at these links:
Once you’ve got the font(s) you need, here’s how to install them:
Then configure your browser to use the newly installed fonts.
This site is accessible in any browser. That’s an important design criterion for me, though unfortunately many of the popular sites don’t seem to care about accessiblity. Therefore I won’t tell you to upgrade your browser.
However, ...
If you have Microsoft Internet Explorer you really ought to consider an alternative, and if you have an older version of any browser you really need to upgrade it to the current version for both performance and security.
You don’t necessaily need to replace your browser, which is good since Microsoft makes it incredibly painful to get MSIE off of a Windows computer. Instead you can install a “spare” browser. Many people don’t know that you can have more than one browser on your machine; if one can’t handle a particular site, sometimes another browser can do a better job with it.
My own personal recommendation is Mozilla Firefox (accessed 2009-12-28), the free open-source browser from Mozilla.org (accessed 2009-12-28). Here are some of Firefox’s advantages over MSIE:
Once again, you don’t have to upgrade your browser to view these pages. But if you do want to give Firefox a whirl, you can still keep your present browser. Just answer No when the Firefox install asks whether to make Firefox your default browser.
28 Dec 2009: lose references to IE4, re-verify links
7 May 2009: strengthen the recommendation aainst MSIE; recheck all links; catch a couple of missed “Mozilla” that should have been changed last time to “Firefox”
5 Oct 2008: verify links and update Prilop’s and Flavell’s pages, update recommendations from Mozilla to Firefox
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This page is used in instruction at Tompkins Cortland Community College in Dryden, New York; it’s not an official statement of the College. Please visit www.tc3.edu/instruct/sbrown/ to report errors or ask to copy it.