Location: Online | CL Homepage | Dept. of Appl. Inf. (AI and DP) | Faculty of Math., Physics, and Inf. | Comenius Univ. Bratislava | Slovakia

CL Requirements

Browser

To view and use CL or the CL demonstration you need Mozilla (version 1.1 or later) or another Mozilla-based browser (Mozilla Firebird v. 0.4 or later, Netscape v. 7.01 or later). The latest version of Mozilla (1.4) for MS Windows (Win32), GNU/Linux, and other platforms can be downloaded here. The minimal (browser-only) installation of Mozilla is sufficient for use with CL. After Mozilla is installed on your system, you should also install mathematical fonts as described in the Fonts section below.

The simplest way to access the online CL demonstration from a GNU/Linux system is to download this package (10.8 MB) containing a suitably set-up minimal installation of Mozilla 1.2.1 for GNU/Linux and the mathematical fonts. Uncompress the archive by typing into your shell

    cd ##the directory into which you have downloaded the package##
    tar xzf mmlmozilla-1.2.1.tar.gz

then run

    mmlmozilla/init

create a new profile for use with this version of Mozilla

    mmlmozilla/mozilla -CreateProfile CL

and start Mozilla using the command

    mmlmozilla/mozilla -P CL http://www.ii.fmph.uniba.sk/cl/online

You can skip the font installation procedure below, the mathematical fonts are contained in the package. Use the profile CL with this version of Mozilla, and your default profile with Mozilla originally installed on your system.

If you do not want to use mmlmozilla any more, you can uninstall it: Close all Mozilla windows (press Ctrl-Q). Run

    mmlmozilla/mozilla -ProfileManager

click CL in Available Profiles, click Delete Profile..., click Delete Files. Remove mmlmozilla by

    rm -rf mmlmozilla

Why Mozilla?

In theory, any web browser capable of viewing XHTML+MathML, and supporting JavaScript 1.5 (ECMA-262 Revision 3) and DOM Level 2 should do. However, we do not know of any such browsers except for the Mozilla-based ones.

In particular, CL does not work with Microsoft Internet Explorer (even with a MathML rendering plugin installed), nor with the Opera browser. Internet Explorer (up to and including the version 6.0) does not support all DOM Level 2 interfaces required by CL (namely the importNode method of the Document interface). Moreover, IE (with a third-party MathML rendering plugin) supports HTML with MathML `islands', a non-standard combination of a markup language based on SGML with a markup language based on XML.

Fonts

To display mathematical symbols, Mozilla needs fonts containing these symbols to be installed on your system. You can try the demonstration without installing mathematical fonts. In such a case, Mozilla displays a popup window with a list of missing fonts, and will try to find the symbols in the fonts already installed on your system. It will replace missing symbols with question marks (?).

Refer to the fonts page of Mozilla MathML project for information on which fonts are needed, and how to obtain and install them. We recommend accessing the demonstration from a Windows machine using, since it is easier to install fonts on MS Windows than on GNU/Linux. Moreover, it is more likely that Mozilla will find required mathematical symbols in fonts (e.g., Lucida Sans Unicode) that are installed on Windows by default.

A quick checklist for the font installation procedure:

Windows
GNU/Linux

The version of Mozilla contained in RedHat Linux 8.0 and 9.0 (as well as the RedHat 8.0 version currently downloadable from mozilla.org) will not find mathematical fonts installed as described in the MathML fonts page, and many basic mathematical symbols appear distorted or out of place (see Mozilla bug 176290). Use the Mozilla+fonts package downloadable from the Browser section of this page.


* – updated within last 7 days Last modified: 2003-07-29T00:35+0200