Technical Advice

➔ Please also read the supplement at the end of the page!

This homepage as well as all web pages created by myself have been edited, if possible, with the Netscape Composer, additionally by manually accessing the HTML code. The following items are the basis for the screen presentation:

Who uses this environment, therefore sees the pages the way they have been intended by me.
    GIF graphics, as a rule, have been reduced to a depth of 16 colors. Graphics imbedded in an HTML page, have been measured in percent, related to the screen width, and are therefore independent of the screen resolution. Those called alone naturally take 25% more space on the screen with 640 × 480, with a higher resolution they appear smaller. With a file transfer by ISDN card and a Pentium 90 processor (= my former equipment) — especially after a basic optimization by Ulead's SmartSaver —, the download time of most of the graphics appears acceptable to me. Voluminous graphic pages (over 100 KB), hardly still involved by now, are indicated in the regular text as such. I keep on trying to reduce file sizes.
    The presenting code page is nearly throughout the (usual) ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1, corresponding to the Windows and ANSI character set); the only exceptions are in “Layout > Bücher” the Tables of Contents and Authors #11 and the Table of Contents #19 as well as the complete Index of Persons: ISO 8859-2 (Latin 2). Additional character sets used are Symbol and Wingdings, which can be considered as installed at least under Windows. It is suggested to select in the browser option “Appearance – Fonts” (accessible in the “Preferences” menu) “Use document-specified fonts”, otherwise they will not be displayed correctly. Hácheks are under Latin 1 indicated (due to the absence of the original character) by a postponed circumflex, e.g. rˆ in the composer's name Dvorˆák.
    The user's browser should be able to display frames, no alternatives are given. As far as acceptable for the 800 × 600 resolution, the 640 × 480 has been taken into account concerning the dimensions.
    Corresponding to the status of my HTML knowledge, no JavaScript is (yet) used.
    Sometimes, the aim of a link is not another web page or artwork but a PDF file. To display the file, the browser opens a plug-in of Adobe's Acrobat Reader programme. This one should have been installed after the browser, otherwise the plug-in might not be found in the correct directory. In the Reader, you will then be able to increase or decrease or even print the pages. Instead of being displayed, the file can also be downloaded using the right mouse button. The Acrobat Reader may, if needed, be downloaded from Adobe's web site.
 

Different environments

The MS Internet Explorer 3.0 was involved in testing as well. A horizontal or vertical shift can result here. The most important observations:
  • In two-digit entries of automatically numbered lists, the numbers are not aligned to the right and the indented text parts do not form a column of its own. (“Layout > Bücher” was therefore numbered manually.)
  • An empty line is not displayed with a line width of 2.0 (as in Netscape) but only as 80.5% thereof.
    • OS/2 shows inexplicable problems with special characters (including the German umlauts) on nearly all the pages, in part both correct and with errors on the same page. There is no solution in sight.

    On the Apple Macintosh, the following errors have been observed: special characters of the Symbol and Wingdings set appear as taken from the standard font (e.g. the hollow arrow pointing to the right used in many bibliograhpical entries has the form of a rhomb) or not recognized at all. In and after italic expressions, blanks are doubled arbitrarily. This is not researched either.
     
    »  I'd like to be informed of wrong displaying in different platforms, resolutions, browsers or other environments not accessible to me. Attached screen shots would be rather helpful.


    Navigation

    Most pages outside the main sub-pages, i.e. those without navigation fields, do not contain own links leading back — strange owners' pages anyway. From there you can return this way: Besides the navigation fields, please make also use of the detailed site-map included on the starting page and in the Index of names to select the various sub-chapters in a faster way.
     
    Jürgen Herber, 12 April 02


    Supplement

    Some few things have changed compared to the above statements:

    Jürgen Herber, 16–22 April 05

     
    © Sept. 1999 – 1 July 2005; 14 Dec. 09 Jürgen Herber  •  www.j-herber.de