Molecular Dynamics News Letter:
Info page
HELP
This page is still under construction
index to this page
Currently the Molecular Dynamics News is available on this server in four different
file formats, allowing you to choose the most convenient one for your system. The
formats are the TeX/LaTeX raw format (.tex), its compiled and
device-independent companion (.dvi), a
Postscript format (.ps) and last but not least the
Hyper Text Markup Language format (html).
The TeX Format
The TeX format and its most common dialect LaTeX are classical text formatting
languages, commonly used in the scientific environment for their convenient
formula and special character handling. The Molecular Dynamics News
Letter is edited using this language and the source code is made available
to you. Since this is a raw text format it contains all the formatting
instructions and is thus difficult to read. You may look at it with a text
editor, but the general idea is to allow you to download this file and
compile it at your own site with your own plain TeX configuration. This may
be useful, for example, if your station does not have the standard
fonts required by the provided .dvi file, or if you can not deal
with the preset paper size.
The dvi Format
TeX files are compiled into a device-independent file format, that
already has the final layout. These files contain information about what
fonts to use and where to put each character. Depending on the printing
or display device, fonts with different resolutions are required. We
try to keep the font requirement as simple as possible by using only the
standard fonts normally used in TeX documents (C-fonts of Computer Modern
Roman and a few others). Most systems will be set up to support these
fonts. However some systems may only provide the older A
or B, fonts or may be missing some of the fonts at a specific size. In that
case you should either define appropriate font substitutes or go for
one of the other file formats. Viewer and printer drivers for .dvi files are
available for about any platform you may work on, and most of them are free.
Ask your local hacker for details.
We also provide the Molecular Dynamic News Letter in Postscript format. This
format contains its fonts in a 300 dpi resolution, which should be appropriate
for most Postscript printers. That way you can download the file and print it
at your own printer or view it on the screen with an appropriate viewer, as
for example ghostscript/ghostview. Be aware of the fact that some postscript
printers are picky about the paper size, refusing to print anything without the
proper paper loaded. Some of those printers do not furnish an error message
explaining why there is no output. For the European readers of the News Letter,
I recommend either obtaining US-letter size paper or finding a
sufficeently tolerant printer.
The HTML Format
The text you are reading now is provided in the Hyper Text Markup Language
(html). If you can read this text, you will probably agree that this
way of providing the Molecular Dynamics News Letter works. The way you see
this text depends strongly on the kind of browser you use and the way you
configured it. Some browsers won't display images at all, some will. The fonts
used, the length of a line and other lay-out features are out of the hands of
the author but are controlled by the reader's hardware and software.
So you are deprived of the information that is given by a specific layout. A
second drawback of this file format is its limited capability to display
special character and formulas. Greek letters, sub- and superscripts,
equations, ... have to be included as images. Depending on your system,
that works well or less well. A nice feature of HTML is that you can reference
within a document and from one document to another. We will try to use this
feature to make it convenient for you to read the News Letter and to obtain
further information about publications, authors and other neat stuff. Just
click your way through the jungle of documents.
The principle
The Molecular Dynamics News Letter is stored in different formats at our server.
As soon as you activate the appropriate link, by clicking the item you want, it
will be sent to your station. Your browser is in charge of dealing with those data.
That is a delicate and difficult job. In general you will need a special viewer
program to display anything else than html files.
Even though the network is down or too-busy once a while and our server shows the
temperament of our University mascot (a banana slug!), most problems you may
encounter will be closely related to your browser.
Know what you want !
Before you take any action you should know what kind of data you
can handle. See the file format section above for more information. Then you should
decide wether you want to read the News Letter right away or if you want the data
written to your disk. Most browsers you have to be told in advance where
to put the data. Chances are, that you want HTML files diplayed immediately and
TeX, dvi or PS files saved to disk.
Do it, - the it's easy, but... section
HTML files should provide the least difficult route to MDN. Just click on the
appropriate link and the document should show up on your screen. If
you want to store the document on a disk you can do it (for most
browsers) after the document has arrived. (Menu File, Save
or Save as for newer Mosaic, Netscape or Cello browsers. For
older Mosaic browsers select Menu Option,
Load to Disk before you "order" the document). The
following information are more MSWindows-specific, since that is
the user shell I am most familiar with, but I think these comments
may also be useful for users of other environments. For displaying
dvi and postscript files you need an external viewer. (For example
dviwin or Ghostview/Ghostscript). You also have to tell your browser
where the viewer is located and that it is supposed to use it under
certain a condition: matching of a file extension. With Mosaic and
Cello this information is to be added to the Cello/Mosaic.ini file,
which is either in the browser's directory or in the windows directory.
Edit the file, see how it is done for other filetypes (.jpg, .au,
.gif, ...) and create a similar line for .dvi or .ps. This, of course,
has to be done before you start the browser. Netscape allows you to
change those settings while the program is running (Menu
Options, Preference, Helper Applications).
Netscape is also friendly enough to ask you what to do if no
viewer is specified. Other browsers keep silent or give just
a short error message. If instead of viewing those files directly
you prefer them stored on your disk, Mosaic makes the job the
easiest: Menu Option, Load to Disk before
you "order" the document. Netscape will ask you what to do only
if no viewer is specified. So undefine the appropriate viewer
(Menu Options, Preference, Helper Applications)
if you have specified one. This has to be done before you download
the file. (Am I repeating myself?) I have not yet figured out an
elegant way to do it with Cello, but I can offer a
work-around. Define a text editor as viewer application. The editor
should be able to handle large files (about 200 kbyte) without adding
formatting tags. When the file arrives, it will be displayed, but don't
bother to read. Just save the file to disk and close the editor. You can
also write a 1 line Mickey Mouse program just to
rename the temporary file and call it as viewer. (saveit.bat: copy %1, [newdrive:newpath/newname])
HELP
- Info
- Home
This page is maintained by bolle@hydrogen.ucsc.edu.
last update: 2/12/95 11:33:28 PM