These pages are intended for an audience of high-school or college-undergraduate level readers who have experienced some success with using World Wide Web browsers. If you have never used a WWW browser by yourself, please read its documentation first. Even better, ask a friend to show you, and then try out as many of its features as you can--you won't break anything. If you have no problems using the pages, then you know how to skip this page and go back to reading.
These pages have been designed for both text-only browsers such as Lynx, and graphical browsers such as Netscape Navigator, using HyperText Markup Language level 2.0, and optional extensions such as font size and background color and cascading style sheets. Pages have not been tested on many other browsers, but ought to display as intended. If there seems to be some problem with proper display, and the browser manufacturer cannot fix it, please email the author at EricEldred@usa.net.
If your interest is in reusing these pages, using them to teach others, or if you're more interested in sausage-making (the gory technical details) than the reading room, then the following may be of interest. Please refer to our !Warn! access page for a free license first. You should also direct your attention to the Usenet newsgroup (not a web page) comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, where discussion of such subjects regularly takes place.
A text-only browser such as Lynx is great for viewing almost all the pages at this site. It is fast, and you can easily start reading without waiting for graphics to load. Once you have files loaded into the cache, reaccess is speedy.
Learn to use all the Lynx commands so you can navigate most easily. We have placed the "Next>" button as the first on the line, as it is more often used than others. But since there are a dozen buttons at the top of the page, it is not so easy to move down with the "down" key to reach an anchor on that first page. One trick is to use the space bar to go to the next page, then the "up" key to move back to the last anchor on the previous page.
In many places we have made navigation a little more difficult for you by placing more than one link on a line. Don't forget to use the down-arrow key to move to the next link on the same page, and the right-arrow key to traverse the link the cursor is on.
Don't forget that with Lynx, you can escape to a shell by pressing the exclamation mark key, and easily take notes or send some mail.
You can also download graphics files such as JPEG and GIF pictures to your local computer, and use other programs to display them later. This is often faster than using a graphic browser.
Although these pages have been designed for both Lynx and for graphic browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, and consequently only a few files use tables and complicated formats, Lynx ought to ignore these tags and display a pretty good page. If it doesn't please e-mail the author at EricEldred@usa.net and we'll try to fix it.
We are especially interested in hearing from blind viewers using Lynx. Are we doing the right thing here?
You can get Lynx from the Lynx web site, or look for other text-only web browsers through our /Search/ page. Lynx is available for many systems, such as Unix, VMS, and Microsoft DOS, and so far is free. It requires only a terminal, so you can also use it with a timesharing account on an Internet service provider's host computer, without even having to buy your own computer.
We favor the 32-bit Windows version of Lynx with Windows 95. It runs inside a DOS text window using colors. You may obtain a free copy of a Windows version of Lynx from www.fdisk.com
Many World Wide Web browser users have Netscape Navigator, so it makes sense to make pages pretty and attractive using their features. These pages are no exception, but the extensions we use to standard HTML 2.0 are minimal, and other browsers and later versions of Netscape should work well, too. Your browser need not support frames or even tables, for example, for the most part. We set font sizes and page backgrounds, but you ought to be able to read the text even if those settings don't apply with your browser.
For optimal viewing of pages at this site, you should set your Options / General Preferences / Images menu to "display images after loading". That way, you can start to read the text in case you have a slow connection or the page contains a large image.
New windows will pop up, in addition to the browser window displayed, when you select some pages, as, for example, the Words glossary on the Hawthorne pages. (We use Netscape's "target" command to do this.) Note that sometimes the new window emerges right over the old one, so it doesn't look like you have two windows. (You'll also know it's a new window because the BACK button won't work any longer--you have to return to the original window.) You can then resize that window and move it to a clear area of your screen. The next time you look up a word it will be displayed in that already-opened second window, so you don't have to do anything to redisplay the original text in the first window. When you are finished with the new window, just dismiss it by clicking in the top right box. This is a sort of poor man's frameset feature, but it's simpler than frames and more flexible.
If you're using a non-frames browser, the "target" command probably won't open a new window, and you'll have to move back and forth in the same window as usual. Have you tried opening a second browser window manually so you can refer to information in it more quickly?
Printing these pages from your browser is usually as simple as selecting the right command, usually from the File menu. However, you may wish to save the page first to your own machine. You can use your browser's Preferences commands to reduce the size of the font (say, to 10 point) so it does not take as much space on paper. If you've saved the file you can also edit the source before printing to eliminate the markup at the end which creates an extra blank page (<pre> to </pre>). We insert these blank lines for online viewers so the linked text always appears at the top of the screen, even if at the very end of the text.
If you try to print a page and your printer gives the error message of not enough memory, you can try to save the file first (see the next section) and print without the graphics.
Another way of tackling the problem is to wait until the page is fully loaded into your browser, then copy it to the clipboard (usually CTRL-a to Edit/Select All, CTRL-c to Edit/Copy). Open your favorite text processor and use its command to Paste the text from the clipboard into the editor. Then you can save the file, print it out in sections, reduce the font size, or transform it into something really nice.
Alternatively, new browser versions have improved the save-to-text-file capability and are an excellent way to strip out the HTML tags and have a text file to work with in your text editor or word processor.
Saving these pages and pictures is also usually simple. Be sure the file is completely loaded onto your machine and displayed on the screen. If it is a graphic, select the individual graphic, then you may see a Save command from the auxiliary menu (right click). Then select the Save or Save As command from your File menu. You may have to type in the name of the file. Files usually have the suffix ".html" and pictures have the suffix of ".gif" or ".jpg." You will usually see the correct name on the Location or Address line. In some cases, graphics must be stored in a separate directory in order to be displayed properly with the HTML code on our pages.
All GIF files were created with a graphics editor licensed to create GIF files, not with a shareware editor.
If you have a real need to download a book that has been broken into separate chapters and graphic files, and it seems to be a great deal of trouble to handle all the parts, we have created ZIP compressed files for many books and directories. If you can't find the zip file, email us and we will respond quickly. There is no need to hoard any of the books here. If this web site disappears, all books will be found through the On-Line Books Page.
To obtain a copy of Netscape Navigator, follow the directions at http://www.netscape.com/
We haven't invested in Netscape stock, so if you use Microsoft Windows we suggest you also try out Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser, available from www.microsoft.com. We don't use any HTML features on our pages that really require either Netscape or Microsoft, but we notice they sometimes behave differently, so we minimize the differences. Using IE5, you can employ the TAB key to move quickly between anchors so you don't have to play minesweeper with the mouse to find them, when we have turned off underlining of links.
A particularly noxious problem we encountered when starting to code pages as XHTML is that users of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.5 on Macintosh cannot view XHTML pages that begin with the normal XML header lines. Instead, they see the XHTML source code as text. For some of those files, we provide an alternate page for users of MSIE4.5 on Mac. The location is given in a comment box in the page head, usually the same as the page you attempted to view, but with an "HTM" suffix instead of "html." This is a bug in the browser, not something we can fix. You should upgrade to a browser from Netscape or another manufacturer. If not, please write Microsoft Corporation and complain that their Mac browser is broken, does not support XML as they promise, and point out that IE5.0 has not been available for the Macintosh. We cannot be expected to write web pages just for that one obsolete and broken browser, sorry.
These are not the only browsers in the web universe. Some people prefer Amaya or Opera; see our /Search/ command to find them, or go to www.browser.org.
Zip files are provided for some texts as a means of compressing the separate files of the book into one smaller file more easily downloaded. Thus you can uncompress the file on your own computer and read it offline with the same web browser that you would spend a long time using online. If you don't already have an uncompression utility that handles "zip" files, you can find one for your computer at www.shareware.com or other online sites.
We'll chosen what we think are reasonable defaults for colors and font sizes. If you dislike our choices, please customize your browser display to whatever you like in font, font size, background color, and so on. Generally, we won't override your personal choices if you bother to set them there, but in some cases you may need to download the file and cut out the cascading style sheet in the header to turn the file into what you prefer. To avoid this, ask your browser manufacturer to allow you to set an overriding CSS yourself in your browser settings.
Set the width of your graphic browser window so you can read a text column with about two or three eye stops. This will be about 60 characters. You should at the same time set the size of the proportional typeface your browser uses, so that it is simultaneously readable without strain at your normal viewing distance, and also does not result in lines too short to require a couple of eye fixations to read. Usually, browser lines are far too long to read comfortably, and there's too much type on the screen for anyone to want to try to read.
Older viewers will probably have difficulty reading text from the screen for long periods of time. We have found that "progressive" (no-line) bifocals are a big improvement over fixed-focus computer lenses, though costly. Don't forget to take frequent breaks.
We have chosen to use the "blockquote" command to indent text columns from both margins, for some of the books online here. This should shrink the column width to make it more readable. If the number of eye fixations you use to read the column is uncomfortable, adjust the size of the whole window and the column will adjust proportionately.
We also have experimented with different typefaces, and have found that, for us, an "old style" face is more readable. Old style typefaces have slanting serifs at the top of lowercase letters, and some of the letters, such as the lowercase "o", slant to the left. The TrueType font named "Book Antiqua" is an excellent old style typeface, and can be purchased from Microsoft or other font vendors. "Times New Roman" is a new-style font but not as pretty. However, we've found that the number of characters per line for the Times type body height may be more than what is easy to read. Of course, HTML puts the responsibility for controlling the end product in the hands of the user of the browser, which renders the text as the user commands in the Preferences dialog box.
Some excellent free TrueType fonts for Microsoft Windows are available at the Microsoft typography pages (some are installed to your system with Microsoft Internet Explorer or with recent editions of Microsoft Windows). We use several of them here and you may install them on your system even if you use Netscape Navigator. We find Georgia and Verdana quite easy to read. If you use Postscript fonts, we also sometimes call for Palatino and Helvetica in our style sheets.
Learn to use the shortcuts from the keyboard for browser commands, instead of the boxes in the command bar, or the pull-down menus. This will be in many cases much faster than using the mouse. For example, "ALT-left-arrow" moves BACK to the previous page in Navigator. Then you can free up some screen real estate by getting rid of the command toolbar. (Alternatively, the right mouse button brings up the BACK command.)
Reading text on a computer screen is an interactive process. Take advantage of multiple windows on your screen. Bring up a text editor window and take notes while you read. You can copy and paste from your browser window to the editor window. BEWARE! We have discovered that copying our perfectly good HTML code to a so-called HTML editor such as FrontPage or Navigator Composer will probably destroy it! Copy HTML source code only to an ASCII text file editor.
We often use a text-to-speech program to read these pages aloud to us instead of moving our eyes across the page. The synthesized voice is usually quite like a computer is supposed to sound (HAL?). But most programs have options to customize, correct mispronunciations, and improve intelligibility. Blind readers seem to use synthesizer hardware screen readers. Some of the Soundblaster sound cards from Computer Labs include a TextAssist screen reader. We have found a free screen reader from Hawaii Education Literacy Project quite effective--it reads Hawaiian too when you really need that! We found that selecting the page in the browser, copying it to the clipboard, and then choosing the clipboard option in the reader software gives the best results. If HTML lines end after an ordinary line length, the reader will pause annoyingly at the end of each line. (Using this software is also a great way to find typos in the text!) Possibly there are better screen readers--you should investigate Dragon System's Naturally Speaking, IBM's ViaVoice, or use our /Search/ page to find another you prefer.
We've provided some tools to help your find your way. You can always use your browser BACK command to return to the previous page you visited. And usually a path through separate pages is available when you just keep pressing the Next> button at the top or bottom of the page. The <Prev button takes you to what we imagine is a preceding page.
If you get seriously lost, just select the "<Prev" link at the top of most pages, and you'll return to the http://eldritchpress.org/nh/hawthorne.html home page or the Eldritch Press home page (which you should bookmark).
All web browsers have a history sheet (Netscape Navigator's is under the Go menu), and you can skip pages backwards by referring to that list. It doesn't hurt to skip ahead some pages rapidly, just to see what's there, and then go back to read them more slowly. This way you'll have a mental map of the text, and you'll actually help the computer by loading pages into its cache so they display more quickly when you return to them. You can even open all the web pages of a book this way, disconnect your modem from the Internet, and go back and read the pages from your browser's cache saved automatically to your disk. Don't forget you can use your browser's File Open commands to read HTML files from your own disk instead of having to connect to the Internet.
You can also save time by using your browser's Search command. CTRL-F (for "Find") brings up a dialog box; when you type in a phrase and press ENTER, the browser will search the current page for the phrase. This is often faster than manually paging through the text, looking for the information. Press ENTER another time to continue the search, and the ESCape key to dismiss the search box when you are finished.
Inside texts, such as The Scarlet Letter, hypertext links are available to external pages, or from other pages to paragraph beginnings of the text, but not between pages of the text itself, nor between anchors on the same page (except the special "End" and "Top" buttons at the top and end of pages).
Paragraph anchors are named in the text source, beginning with "g01" for the second word of the first paragraph of each chapter, "g02" for the next paragraph, and so on. In some cases you have to look at the source (available under the View menu) to find the number for this reference; we didn't want to clutter up the text with it. Some pages we've done more recently have a reference both to and from the paragraph anchor, so if you click on the first word in the paragraph, the display will shift to that line at the top of the window and the link reference (such as "#g03" will show at the end of the Location line. If you are reading a printed book, the paragraphs ought to be about the same, so you can number them in pencil and use a hypertext reference such "sl02.html#g03" to jump to the corresponding third paragraph of the second online chapter of The Scarlet Letter.
One reason for using the first line of the paragraph as the anchor is that browsers display text jumped to right at the top of the screen, so you can't see any preceding lines of context. We've also added some blank lines at the bottom of the web page so that you'll still see the text you jump to at the top line of the screen, if there's less than a full screen of text to display, such as at the end of chapters.
Real "page numbers" as in a printed book don't exist in the hypertext markup language used on the World Wide Web. We started adding tags for pagebreaks per the Text Encoding Initiative, but most pages here don't have them yet. (In some cases, you'll find the page numbers in the source, such as "p01" anchors.) However, paragraph tags ought to work as well as anything.
Because there are a lot of links on these pages, they will be disturbing at first. We suggest that you use your Preferences dialog box to turn off underlining, and either let the HTML codes in the source control the color of your links, or customize them to colors you are comfortable with. In fact, you might at first turn off (make into a black color) all links, and play minesweeper by moving the cursor over words you want to click on (you'll see the linked page location appear in the line at the bottom of your browser window, if there's a link for that word). Also, in later versions of Internet Explorer you can use the TAB key to sequence through the links even when they are not underlined. When you want to make the links stand out, you can change the colors. After you use this system a while you will not be so bothered by the many links. Just remember that you don't need to follow all of them and don't pay attention to their whining.
If you click on a link and nothing seems to happen, perhaps the page is already displayed. Some underlined words, especially the first ones in a paragraph, are self-links so you can read the paragraph number from the Location line and learn how to make an external link to that paragraph. They don't do anything else other than move the linked text to the top of the window.
We think the most important point for the reader is close attention to the original text, so we haven't made references to notes as easy to get to as they are in some systems.
As is standard World Wide Web practice, you do not need to ask special permission to make links from your pages to these. However, you should examine the Access page first for any legal questions.
You may make "deep links" to paragraphs or other anchors inside our pages without asking us.
You should follow the style of your teacher when writing citations or referring in your papers to these pages. Here is one online style guide to consider. The author of unattributed notes is Eric Eldred (mailto:EricEldred@usa.net). The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) can always be seen in the Location: or Address: box of graphic browsers, or by pressing "=" in Lynx. Note as well as the date you download the page.
Here is a citation guide we are starting to place at the bottom of some of our pages. We include three snippets you can copy and paste, so as to make the correct citations in MLA style, as is usual in the humanities.
The first paragraph contains some HTML code you may copy for an online MLA-style Works Cited reference to the WWW page where you find the suggested citation snippet. (you might want to paste this inside a <li> list element of your own HTML code, at the end of an online paper-webpage, for example.) Be careful when using an HTML editor such as FrontPage, since the code may get fouled up--use a regular text editor such as WordPad instead. Also, the lines may be long--be sure there is no carriage return introduced in the last long line, or you'll end up with an extra space on the line, or code that won't run:
Lathrop, George Parsons. Introduction to <cite>Passages from<br />
the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne</cite>.<br />
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883. 21 Sep. 1999. <br />
<<a href="http://eldritchpress.org/nh/pfa-gpl.html">http://eldritchpress.org/nh/pfa-gpl.html</a>>
The second code fragment you can copy and paste into
your online HTML paper is for an inline reference, within
parenthesis, as in MLA style. Many of our web pages have
anchors corresponding to printed page numbers or at least
paragraph numbers--you may have to View the Page Source to
find them. The original printed page numbers
are given as anchors ("p05" to "p11") in our
HTML Page Source; also, paragraphs here are numbered starting with "g01"
--see the first word in each paragraph for an anchor you can
link to. For example, this code in your online paper
(<a href="http://eldritchpress.org/nh/pfa-gpl.html#p05">Lathrop, 5</a>)
links to the first printed page of the referenced text--try it:
(Lathrop, 5)
--in online MLA style.
And here is a sample text fragment for printed Works Cited MLA-style (the result of the above, but when you are typing it is supposed to be double-spaced as well as the body indented--if your browser doesn't render it as double-spaced, add another return to the end of each line, and you may need to use your word processor to underline or italicize the title after pasting it):
Lathrop, George Parsons. Introduction to Passages from
the American Note-Books of Nathaniel
Hawthorne.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883.
21 Sep. 1999.
<http://eldritchpress.org/nh/pfa-gpl.html>
If you refer to more than one web page with the same author, in your Works Cited you will have to follow the MLA style guide instructions to replace the author name by dashes, and when making inline references adapt the reference to the title. Warning: there are variants to MLA style, such as adding the date you downloaded the page, so check with your instructor for further guidance, or refer to the online guides at Purdue University Online Writing Lab or Columbia.
Richard Seltzer has provided helpful instructions so readers of these languages can translate the English text on these pages, using AltaVista from Digital Equipment.
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Please send your own contributions or corrections:
mailto:EricEldred@usa.net
URL:
http://eldritchpress.org/help.html
Last updated:
$Date: 1999/10/07 23:58:35 $
©Copyright 1996-1999 Eric Eldred - see license
?Help? Page from Eldritch Press