Configuring NCSA's Mosaic for Ease of Use

Setting the Default Page Size

Add this line to your .Xdefaults file:

Mosaic*geometry:                        800x984+422+35

Main access page

General Help access.

Enabling the Page Up and Page Down Keys on the Keyboard

Add this line to your .Xdefaults file:

Mosaic*catchPriorAndNext:               true

Main access page

General Help access.

Setting a Default Printer

Add a line something like this to your .Xdefaults file:

Mosaic*printCommand:    lpr -Pprinter_name >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

Main access page

General Help access.

Setting a Default Font

The default font must be one that supports ISO Latin 1 (8-bit rather than 7-bit ascii), in order to show, for example, Nosé as Nosé and not Nos.

If the word Nosé does not appear here with an e with an accent mark, you need to add a line something like this to your .Xdefaults file:

Mosaic*font:    -adobe-times-medium-r-normal-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1

Main access page

General Help access.

Adding the Discover Hypertext Documentation to One of Your .html Files

First, start up Mosaic as follows:

Mosaic -home $BIOSYM/doc/discover/Disco_Home.html

or:

Mosaic $BIOSYM/doc/discover/Disco_Home.html

Look in the small text-window labelled URL:, near the top of the main Mosaic window. (It may be labelled Location: in other browsers.) It will probably say something like:

file://localhost/net/usr/local/biosym/release950/doc/discover/Disco_Home.html

In this example, the $BIOSYM environment variable has been resolved to /net/usr/local/biosym/release950/.

However, UNIX environment variables work only when starting up Mosaic (and only if you have sourced the .cshrc file that defines them, which may have happened automatically when you logged in) and not from within another html file. So, the URL to use in linking to the main access page for the Discover documentation would be the actual location of this file at your site, for example:

/net/usr/local/biosym/release950/doc/discover/Disco_Home.html

and the entry in your .html file would be something like:

 <A
HREF="/net/usr/local/biosym/release950/doc/discover/Disco_Home.html">Discover
documentation</A> <P>

This means that your system's default server-mode (whether http:// or file:// or ftp://) will be used and will go through the default localhost (if any), to access the file. Mosaic is usually better at adding the correct defaults than you might be (especially if you organization has a heterogeneous net system and users on other machines will also be accessing your .html file), so it is best not to specify them in the URL.

You can, of course, just add the main access page for the Discover documentation to your personal hotlist.

Main access page

General Help access.