IBM techexplorer Hypermedia Browser 
Version 2.0 Preview Release 3

Important techexplorer Information and Change History This document contains important information about your techexplorer installation. Please read it carefully.

• General configuration notes

• Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT
• UNIX
• IBM AIX 4.1
• Sun Solaris 2.5
• SGI IRIX 6.2
• Change history

• Trademarks
• Copyright

General configuration notes

• You must exit your web browser before installing this or any other inline plug-in. Plug-ins can only be loaded when the browser starts, so you must exit and re-start your browser if you have not done so already.
• Your Netscape Navigator cache size must be large enough! Look at the Options > Network Preferences > Cache menu settings and make sure your your memory cache is at least 1024 kilobytes and the disk cache is at least 5000 Kilobytes. If the settings are too small, techexplorer may fail to load image files and "input" files.
• After you install techexplorer, start Netscape Navigator and look at Help > About Plug-ins. The techexplorer plug-in should be listed.
• Important advice: click the right mouse button within a techexplorer window to access user options and information about the product.
• To learn more about techexplorer and to ensure that you always have the newest version, please visit the official IBM techexplorer web site at http://www.ics.raleigh.ibm.com/ics/techexp.htm. Prerelease versions of techexplorer may also be available from IBM AlphaWorks at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com.
• A non-IBM-sponsored techexplorer mailing list is available for public discussion of this product. To subscribe to the list send e-mail to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU with the BODY of the mail containing the command

    SUB techexplorer YourFirstName YourLastName
For example, if your name is Pat Jones, send email to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU with the text of the email being
    SUB techexplorer Pat Jones

Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT

• This plug-in will work only for Microsoft Windows 32 bit versions of the Netscape Navigator or Navigator Gold clients, version 3.0 or greater. It may not work with pre-release (e.g. "beta" or "preview release") versions of the Netscape Navigator. Many of the features of this plug-in are also available when used with the Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0. This plug-in further requires Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 (or greater).
• If you get a message from Microsoft Internet Explorer similar to "The data that the plugin requested, did not download successfully", this simply means that techexplorer requested a file or image that is not present on the server. Netscape Navigator does not notify you in this way.
• Regarding fonts and symbols: techexplorer can use several different set of fonts for finding the symbols it needs (for example, greek letters). To see the font sets that are available on your machine while in techexplorer, right-click your mouse in a techexplorer window and click on the "Math and Symbols" tab. The more complete symbol font sets are toward the bottom of the list. If techexplorer encounters a symbol in a document for which there is no character in the select symbol font set, the symbol name is displayed in red, as in "\hookLeftarrow". You may be able to view such symbols by adding additional fonts to your machine. See the techexplorer user guide for more information.
• The actual plug-in file is called nptchexp.dll. There is no standalone executable file.

UNIX

Installation

Un-tar this file by issuing
 

        tar -xvf techexplorer-v20pr3.rs6000-ibm-aix4.1.tar

The installation package contains files in gzip format. Many UNIX systems already have this installed but you may be able to download it from
        ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/unsupported/gnu
if necessary. If you do install gzip, remember the installation location because you may need it in the setup process.

Now execute setup in a shell window. This will ask you some questions about whether you accept the license agreement and where some system utilities are located. To accept the default choices, press the Enter (or Return) key.

Shared installation Note

    TECHEXPLORER_HOME=your techexplorer installation directory;
    export TECHEXPLORER_HOME;
    NPX_PLUGIN_PATH=$NPX_PLUGIN_PATH:$TECHEXPLORER_HOME/PlugIn;
    export NPX_PLUGIN_PATH;

The TECHEXPLORER_HOME variable will point techexplorer to the appropriate installation directory. The NPX_PLUGIN_PATH will allow Netscape to add techexplorer to the list of available Plug-ins. When a user invokes techexplorer for the first time in a shared installation, a new directory ($HOME/.techexpl) is created in which personal configuration files are placed.

• IBM's techexplorer is dynamically linked with the X Window System Version 11 and Motif libraries. If the Motif dynamic libraries are not properly installed, techexplorer will not be able to execute. On some installations the Motif libraries are found in /usr/dt/lib. If the linker can not find the Motif libraries, you will have to update the linker's search path by setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable as follows:

• The setup program creates the following directory hierarchy:

techexplorer executes with the same User ID as Netscape Navigator and must have read and write access to the $HOME/.techexpl directory and its contents. If necessary, you can change the file permission modes by using the chmod command. If you are using an AFS file system, the fs command may have to be used to set the required privileges. For example:

    fs la $HOME/.techexpl
    fs sa $HOME/.techexpl/ system:anyuser rl
 

Notes

• This version only supports GIF and JPEG image formats.
• Some features in the Microsoft Windows version of techexplorer may not yet be available or fully and correctly implemented in this release. In particular:
• Property pages for Math and Symbols enabled in a later preview release.
• A few character mappings are missing or wrong.
• This version of the UNIX edition of techexplorer does not support selection/drag operations.
• Support for the Mathematical Markup Language in this version requires that you associate the text/mathml MIME type with the mml suffix. For example using Netscape Communicator open the applications property page by following the Edit >Preferences > Navigator > Applications menu. Select and Edit the text/mathml entry. Make sure that the MIME Type is text/mathml and that the Suffixes is set to mml.

• Regarding fonts and symbols: techexplorer ships with and uses a subset of the publicly available PostScript Type 1 version of the Computer Modern fonts from BlueSky Research and Y&Y, Inc., via the American Mathematical Society. To see if the fonts can be correctly used by techexplorer on your machine, type the following to the shell:

    xset fp default
    xset +fp $HOME/.techexpl/Fonts
    xset fp rehash
• You can display a font by invoking xfd:

    xfd -fn -bluesky-cmbsy10-bold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-adobe-fontspecific
• The X Window System server must have read access to the fonts files in order to render. Incorrect directory permissions will cause the above xset or xfd commands to fail. See above for more information on file permission modes. Several users have noted that, for their particular system, the "all others read" (chmod o+r $HOME/.techexpl/Fonts)  permission flag must be set for the X Window System to access the font directory.

Font Path Note

Font Server Note

For example, on the techexplorer installation machine you can execute:

    fs -config fs.config -port 8000

and on the remote X display execute:

    xset fp default
    xset +fp tcp/hostname:8000
    xset fp rehash

Here is a sample fs.config file:

    client-limit = 10
    clone-self = on
    catalogue = $HOME/.techexpl/Fonts
    default-point-size = 120
    default-resolutions = 100,100,75,75
    use-syslog = off

If techexplorer encounters a symbol in a document for which there is no character in the select symbol font set, the symbol name is displayed in red, as in "\hookLeftarrow".

IBM AIX 4.1

1. This version of techexplorer requires IBM AIX 4.1 or greater.
2. This plug-in will work only for IBM AIX versions of the Netscape Navigator or Netscape Communicator clients, version 4.03 or greater.
• Pay special attention to the AIX "Installation Troubleshooting" section of Netscape's README file.
• It may not work with pre-release (e.g. "beta" or "preview release") versions of the Netscape Navigator.
• It may not work with releases of  AIX Netscape Navigator or Communicator distributions that were created before September 19th, 1997.

Sun Solaris 2.5

1. This version of techexplorer requires Sun Solaris 2.5 or greater.
2. This plug-in will work only for Sun SPARC Solaris versions of the Netscape Navigator or Navigator Gold clients, version 2.0 or greater. It may not work with pre-release (e.g. "beta" or "preview release") versions of the Netscape Navigator.

SGI IRIX 6.2

1. This version of techexplorer requires SGI IRIX 6.2.
2. This plug-in will work only for SGI IRIX versions of the Netscape Navigator or Navigator Gold clients, version 3.0 or greater.  It may not work with pre-release (e.g. "beta" or "preview release") versions of the Netscape Navigator.

Change history

Version 2.0 PR 3 (17 March, 1997)

• Common

1. Renamed the Standard Edition to be the Introductory Edition.
2. Many internal performance improvements.
3. Decreased the relative sizes of the fonts bigger than the normal size.
4. Added support for \newenvironment without the optional argument.
5. Can now handle %20 in URLs.
6. Enhanced the handling of control sequences that expect filenames so that now macro arguments will be expanded. Thus you can now use \includegraphics in a macro definition with the URL being one of the macro arguments.
7. Fixed a problem whereby the title page information was placed at the location of \maketitle rather than at the top of the document.
8. Fixed a problem whereby footnotes in title pages were not active.
9. Fixed a problem concerning incorrect handling of links with \hbox to \hsize expressions.
10. Although they are still unnumbered, \ref, \pageref, and \eqref now act as hyperlinks if the corresponding label is in the same document.
11. Added AMS-TeX macros \iff, \implies, and \impliedby.
12. An \index control sequence is now treated as a label with label name INDEX- followed by ASCIIfied version of the index term. Thus \index{matrix} generates the internal label INDEX-matrix. Blanks are allowed in the corresponding label names.
13. We now parse and then ignore the following LaTeX and TeX style parameters: \abovedisplayshortskip, \abovedisplayskip, \arraycolsep, \arrayrulewidth, \baselineskip, \baselinestretch, \belowdisplayshortskip, \belowdisplayskip, \bibindent, \columnsep, \columnseprule, \dblfloatsep, \dbltextfloatsep, \doublerulesep, \evensidemargin, \fboxrule, \fboxsep, \file, \floatsep, \footnotesep, \footskip, \hangafter, \hangindent, \headheight, \headsep, \hsize, \intextsep, \jot, \leftskip, \linewidth, \magnification, \marginparpush, \marginparsep, \marginparwidth, \mathindent, \oddsidemargin, \pageheight, \pagewidth, \parindent, \parskip, \rightskip, \tabbingsep, \tabcolsep, \textfloatsep, \textheight, \textwidth, \topmargin, \topskip, and \vsize. (Note that we won't always ignore them in the future!)

• Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT

1. Fixed image problem when using Internet Explorer and documents from web sites.
2. Added more multimedia support via \includeaudio and \includevideo. (Professional Edition only.)
3. Renamed the Security property page to be the Permissions property page and added checkboxes for autoplaying audio and video.

• UNIX

1. SGI IRIX 6.2 version of techexplorer.
2. Support for the following control sequences for hypermedia links: \popupLink, \yesNoLink, \inputboxLink, \appLink, \statusLineText and \backgroundimage.
3. Rudimentary parse error support.
4. Property  pages for Security and Errors are now enabled.
5. Can now handle inline TeX data within HTML pages.
6. Support for installation on a shared file system.
7. Setup removes previous techexplorer installation.
8. Fixed a problem which caused a X Window warning message when context menus are used.
9. Fixed a problem which caused a X Window warning message when jumping to a document label that resides near the end of the document.
10. Scrolling using the incremental arrow now scrolls the document one line at a time.
11. Added support for visual feedback in the form of a wait cursor during compute intensive compose and draw phases.

Version 1.9 for the IBM eNetwork Communications Suite (Spring, 1998)

• Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT

1. Many internal performance improvements.
2. Fixed image problem when using Internet Explorer and documents from web sites.
3. Decreased the relative sizes of the fonts bigger than the normal size.
4. Can now handle %20 in URLs.
5. Added more multimedia support via \includeaudio and \includevideo.

Version 2.0 PR 2 (7 November, 1997)

• Common

1. We've added support for a subset of the Mathematical Markup Language being devised by the World Wide Web Consortium HTML Math Working Group. The current support in techexplorer is restricted to the presentation subset of the draft plus some updates from the forthcoming draft. Support in this version should be considered experimental and will be updated to be in compliance with the next draft from the working group when it becomes available.
2. We now support frames for \docLink. The syntax is

        \docLink[ frame ]{ documentFileName}[ label ]{ textToDisplay }
where frame is the name of the frame as defined in an HTML page. For example,

<FRAMESET COLS="250,*">
<FRAME MARGINWIDTH="15" SRC="toc.tex" NAME="toc">
<FRAME MARGINWIDTH="15" SRC="first.tex" NAME="first">
</FRAMESET>

defines the two frames toc and first. An example usage in toc.tex might be

Click \docLink[first]{first.tex}{here} to jump to the first chapter.

3. We now support fully formatted text in pop-up windows such as those produced by \footnote and \popupLink. A current restriction is that links that require a URL do not work from within these pop-up windows.
4. AMS-LaTeX-related changes:

• Added the matrix, bmatrix, Bmatrix, pmatrix, vmatrix, and Vmatrix environments.
• Added \overleftarrow, \overleftrightarrow, \underrightarrow, \underleftarrow, and \underleftrightarrow.
• Added \cfrac (with optional l or r argument), \lcfrac and \rcfrac.
• Added \boxed.
• Added \dotsb, \dotsc, \dotsi, and \dotsm.
• Added \medspace, \negmedspace, \thickspace, and \negthickspace.
• Added support for the b and t optional argument for \smash.
• Added the sloppypar environment.

• Added \Bmatrix.
• Added \roman, \bold, and \mathbb. Note that \mathbb and \Bbb are only supported if you have fonts that contain the blackboard bold characters. Otherwise regular bold characters are used.
• Added \mathchoice.
• Added basic support for \mathbin, \mathclose, \mathopen, \mathord, \mathrel.
• Added no-op support for the NFSS commands \fontencoding, \fontfamily, \fontseries, \fontshape, and \fontsize.
• Fixed parsing for \left and \right so that decimal numbers following these control sequences are handled properly. For example, \left.6 is now parsed as \left. 6 rather than as \left .6.
• Whitespace is now correctly always removed after macro expansion in math mode.
• Added a document properties menu item to the document context menu.
• Improved vertical placement of bars in \underline and \overline
• Added accents: \^,  \=, \., \b
• Added support for the inverted question mark (?`) and inverted exclamation point (!`) forms.
• Fixed the placement of subscripts on expressions of large depth.
 
• Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT

1. When you change the standard background color in the Colors property page, the change is reflected immediately when you click the OK or Apply buttons.
2. Added support for the math fonts that ship with the MathType product from Design Science.
3. We now do a complete job of translating %7C in URLs for a local file to '|'. These characters usually appear in URLs in directory listings.
4. Control sequences that require a URL (such as \includegraphics) now accept Windows-style drive:path syntax.
5. We rewrote the installation script to ease installation under Microsoft Internet Explorer and to allow for future additional items.
•  UNIX
1. IBM AIX 4.1 version of techexplorer.
2. Improved scrolling performance.
3. Added the following property pages: Math Auto Color, Colors, Fonts, Roman Fonts, and Font Path.
4. Added a techexplorer resource database.
5. We now check for font availability before adding techexplorer's font path information to the X Window System.
6. Fixed various text color related problems.
7. Jumping to a label in the middle of a document now positions the display at the correct location.
8. Embedded techexplorer windows in HTML files no longer require an initial scroll to become visible.

Version 2.0 PR 1 (2 September, 1997)

1. Solaris 2.5 version of techexplorer in addition to versions for Windows 95 and Windows NT! More UNIX versions to come!
2. Much internal reorganization for UNIX versions of techexplorer.
3. Greatly improved parsing error reporting.
4. Added support for \sc and \textsc (small caps).
5. Fixed double drawing of screen when you jump to a label in the middle of a document.
6. Now allow use of \fill with \hspace, \vspace, and cousins.
7. Added support for \backgroundimage: \backgroundimage{imageFileUrl} uses the image located at imageFileUrl to tile the window background.
8. Added \statusLineAction. \statusLineAction{statusLineText}{displayText} shows displayText on the screen and shows statusLineText in the status line when the mouse passes over displayText.
9. Improved status line messages for links.
10. Changed \cite to not be in italics in an italic environment.
11. Verbatim now works better in list environments and other environments which change the left margin.
12. Improved the status line message for the various link types that produce dialog boxes.
13. \docLink now supports an optional first argument for a frame name (but it is not used yet).
14. Made the optional argument to \item and the arguments to \tilde,\^ and \_ implicit groups.
15. Added basic parsing and display support for \axiomLink (but it is not functional in linking to AXIOM).
16. Tabular environments inside math mode now have contents in horizontal mode.
17. Fixed mishandling of \end{verbatim} when it appears after the beginning of a line.
18. Fixed math modes so that they are not affected by a containing \lowercase or \uppercase.
19. Fixed problem on Windows NT whereby spaces caused extra vertical space below a line.
20. Fixed problem with macro definitions with arguments inside \iftechexplorer blocks.
21. Fixed problem with non-braced macro arguments whereby something like \foo12 would put 12 in the first argument to \foo rather than just the 1.
22. \newif\iftechexplorer incorrectly started an \if block.

Version 1.2 (3 February, 1997)

1. Fixed \docLink to not open a new copy of the current document if that is the link target.
2. Fixed vertical alignment of default minipage environment format.
3. Added additional check to make sure you can see the full line when jump to a label in the middle of a document.
4. Added symbol mappings for \thorn, \Thorn, and \THORN.

Version 1.2 Beta 6 (17 January, 1997)

1. Added \thinspace, \negthinspace, and \fcolorbox.
2. Added no-op handling for \newblock, \@, \newif, \techexplorertrue, and \techexplorer false.
3. Now support the application/x-latex MIME types along with the *.latex and *.ltx file extensions.
4. We added *.bbl as a handled file extension within the application/x-tex MIME type. This may require an update to your web server MIME type table.
5. We now support '%7C' as a substitute for the ':' or '|' in local file names or URLs. This was done because Netscape sometimes inserts these.
6. We fixed a problem that caused a crash when the user tried to display the options pages and an older version of the Windows 95 COMCTL32.DLL was on the user's machine.

Version 1.2 Beta 5 (23 December, 1996)

1. Added the tabbing and minipage environments.
2. Added support for \newcommand and friends where the macro name is not contained in braces (e.g., \newcommand\foo{...}).
3. Control characters can now be used as names in macro definitions.
4. Corrected parsing of "$$" when in math mode, so that $a$$<$$b$ is now parsed as 3 non-display math items.
5. Improved relative sizing of display vs. text style, particularly in fractions made by \over and \frac.

Version 1.2 Beta 4 (12 December, 1996)

1. The center, flushleft, and flushright environments are now properly implemented in terms of paragraphs and added \centering, \raggedleft, and \raggedright.
2. Scripts are now handled corectly for \underbrace and \overbrace.
3. Added bitmaps for the following characters that were missing from the basic font sets: \asymp, \coprod, \flat, \frown, \models, \smile.
4. Added symbol mappings for \land and \lor.
5. Added \v and \check and handle \i as "i" and \j as "j".
6. Fixed the vertical alignment of superscript expressions with empty bodies, e.g., $^1$.
7. Fixed a bug in drawing \text.
8. Fixed a bug regarding copying the optional args for images.
9. Fixed a bug whereby the "missing image" bitmap was not being displayed for local files missing for the plug-in.
10. Fixed a bug whereby images were not immediately displayed under Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Version 1.2 Beta 3 (14 November, 1996)

1. Located and fixed major bug related to resource bitmaps and 16 bit color that caused Netscape to crash.
2. Added support for \binom, \displaylines, \endgraf, \line, \llap, \ne, \operatorname, \shadowbox, \text, \raisebox, and \rlap.
3. Added support for \iftechexplorer, \ifmmode, \iftrue, and \iffalse.
4. Added \tfrac, \dfrac. These and \frac now support the optional line thickness.
5. Added \mod, \pod, and improved the formatting of \pmod.
6. Added \noalign and \nocorr as no-ops.
7. Fixed the display of \choose.
8. Added \zig (which is a horizontally-reflected \zag).
9. Added support for \usecounter with enumi, enumii, enumiii, enumiv.
10. Added \overbracket and \underbracket. Temporarily set \overbrace and \underbrace equal to them, respectively.
11. We now draw large '<' and '>' used as delimiters (they look much better).
12. Fixed white space around '/' and \backslash in math mode.
13. Fixed symbol mapping for \imath and the Monotype math fonts.
14. Added support in font set mappings for the AMS Greek and Hebrew characters \digamma, \varkappa, \beth, \daleth, and \gimel, where available.
15. Added bitmaps for the following characters that were missing from the basic font sets: \bigtriangleup, \bigtriangledown, \doteq, \gg, \hookleftarrow, \imath, \leadsto, \lhd, \ll, \longmapsto, \leftharpoondown, \leftharpoonup, \rhd, \rightharpoondown, \rightharpoonup, \rightleftharpoons, \triangleleft, and \triangleright.
16. Fixed a bug in context menus whereby the 40th entry was ignored.
17. Added basic support for the slide environment (old-style with one argument).
18. Now display a button indicating that we are waiting for files to arrive.
19. Added option (under "Miscellaneous") for showing parsing errors.
20. Implemented \to to be the same as \rightarrow except when used with \overset and \underset.
21. Added information in the read.me file about fonts and symbols. Also added change history.

Version 1.2 Beta 1 (19 September, 1996)

1. Made \lowercase, \overline, \underline, and \uppercase implicit grouping operators.
2. Added support for GIF, JPG, and PCX image formats.
3. Implemented inline TeX markup within HTML EMBED tags for Netscape 3.0 compatible browsers.
4. Fixed bugs in URL merge code regarding "../.." and "mailto".
5. Improved formatting around 'f' and 'p' in math mode.
6. Fixed long-standing bug with \Huge causing GPF.

Trademarks

Netscape Navigator is a trademark of the Netscape Communications Corporation.

Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

Sun, Solaris, and SPARC are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

SGI and IRIX are trademarks or registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc.

UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd.

Copyright