Index

Instructions for Setting up the Netscape 1.1N Browser

Startup Mode and Styles.

You can control whether Netscape initialises from a document acquired from the Network or from a local disk. Select from the Options menu of Netscape first Preferences and then Styles;

Here, Netscape will actually start on the ECTOC Home page, and will require the network connection to be active. If you want to use Netscape as a local viewer whilst you are editing your own contribution, leave the home page blank, or select a blank startup page.

Directories, and Other Programs.

If you want to view the original HTML from any document, you will have to configure a source viewer. It may also be convenient to configure a "Telnet" program to allow connection to other on-line services. The various options are selected from the Options menu of Netscape as first Preferences and then Directories;

Support for Proxies.

If you are connecting from across the Atlantic, you may experience delays in acquiring some of the larger documents. One solution to this problem is to define what is called a local proxy. This is a World-Wide Web server that stores any document acquired for the first time, and makes this copy avaialable to local users. This avoids repeated acquisitions of the same document, and takes advantage of local network speeds rather than the Atlantic connection. The Netscape configuration looks like this. Select from the Options menu of Netscape first Preferences and then Proxies;

We also hope to set up a North American "mirror" of the conference to facilitate transatlantic requests.

Support for Chemical Documents.

Select from the Options menu of Netscape first Preferences and then helper applications. New entries should be added as required. The four shown below correspond to Acrobat "pdf" file, molecular 3D structures in the "pdb" format, MDL "tgf" Sketch files and the Kinemage "kin" file. Other possibilities include the chemical/x-mdl-molfile format (.mol). for a complete list, click here. the final result corresponding to;

. Additional entries can be added as required.

Support for Mail

The Mail entry has the following entries;

Chemically Cognisant Electronic Mail (Chemmail)

It is becoming increasingly common for electronic mail programs to support a protocol known as MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). This allows one or more additional files to be "attached" to the purely text based content of a message, and to be "extracted" upon receipt by the receiver of the message. If you are using version 1.1 of the Netscape browser, this facility of attaching a chemical file to any message you may wish to send is available to you. First, check that your MIME types are correctly configured and the proceed as shown in the following three screens;

Other E-Mail Programs

Eudora for Macintosh. To configure this program, acquire a small "plug-in" and place it in the same folder that Eudora uses to store your in and out mail boxes. To send a "PDB" or "TGF", you MUST ensure that the filename has the appropriate suffix, either .pdb or .tgf which Eudora will use to assign the MIME type. [It is also possible to assign on the basis of so called "file types" and "creators" but that is another story]. When such a file is attached to a message, it should carry chemical/x-pdb or chemical/x-mdl-tgf identifiers. When such identifiers are detected in an incoming message, the files concerned are automatically assigned e.g RSML creator type for PDB files, which means that RasMol will be used to activate them. You can test this all works by creating a small dummy file, give it a .pdb extension, and send it to yourself. Upon receipt of the message using the commerical version of Eudora, double click on the name of the file as it appears at the bottom of your message to yourself. This should start RasMol running. Users with the freely distributable version of Eudora will need to click on the received file in the "Attachments folder".

Eudora for PC Windows. You will need to add the following lines to the eudora.ini file in your system;

[Mappings]
both=mol,Gmdl,mMOL,chemical,x-mdl-molfile
both=pdb,RSML,TEXT,chemical,x-pdb
both=tgf,Gmdl,mTGF,chemical,x-mdl-tgf

Pine 3.9.1 for Unix. The configuration file called .mailcap resident in your top level personal directory needs the following lines added;
```
chemical/x-pdb; rasmol %s
chemical/x-mdl-tgf; isis %s
```
to correctly recognise incoming mail attachments.

A test page which enables you to find out if you e-mail program is set up correctly is available here.

Other World-Wide Web Browsers

Netscape 1.1N is "full-featured", but also quite resource hungry. Mosaic 2.00b12 supports many of the Netscape features. The MacWeb/WinWeb browsers from EINET do not offer quite the full range of features, but have much smaller memory requirements and in some aspects are faster in operation. There are also an increasing range of commercial browsers that may prove suitable for use with this conference.