Using SIGDA Publications on CD-ROM on UNIX

This document contains information to help you to use the SIGDA Publications on CD-ROM on a UNIX platform. You may browse the proceedings with an HTML (HyperText Markup Language) Browser (such as Mosaic and Netscape) for the HTML pages, and a PostScript Viewer or an Acrobat Reader to view individual papers of the proceedings. In this case, the HTML pages contain links to individual papers which are available in both PostScript format or Portable Document Format (PDF). External viewers such as ghostview, pageview (both are for PostScript files) and Acrobat Reader (for PDF files) are required to view individual papers.

Alternatively, you may use Acrobat Reader alone to browse the entire proceedings. We provide an almost exact mirror of the HTML pages in the PDF format. However, Acrobat Reader is not available on all UNIX platforms; if you are not using SUN SunOS, SUN Solaris, and SGI IRIX, you may have to use a combination of HTML browsers and PostScript viewers to browse the proceedings. Although Acrobat Reader is provided for HP HP-UX, due to the mapping of filenames when the CD-ROM is mounted, the links in the PDF files might not be correct and the option of using Acrobat Reader alone might not be feasible.

General

You should read this document in its entirety the first time you use the conference proceedings on CD-ROM. It tells you about what is on the CD-ROM, how to mount the CD-ROM on various UNIX platforms, how to set up your HTML browser to use the CD-ROM effectively, and how to access the Proceedings on CD-ROM. The instructions are given for those using Mosaic as the HTML browser; however, Netscape or other HTML browsers may also be used.

After you have configured your Mosaic browser, you can browse the proceedings on CDROM by using one of the following commands (depending on which platform you're using):

% Mosaic -home main_ss.htm [for Sun, SGI or Linux machines]

or

% Mosaic -home 'MAIN_DH.HTM;1' [for DEC or HP machines]

You may not have to use the "-home" option. Instead, use

% Mosaic main_ss.htm [for Sun, SGI or Linux machines]

or

% Mosaic 'MAIN_DH.HTM;1' [for DEC or HP machines]

Of course, you can always start Mosaic or Netscape without specifying the home page and then use "open local" or "open file", respectively, to open the CD-ROM Home Page.

File Structure

Taking DAC'97 Conference Proceeding on CD-ROM as an example, this CD-ROM consists of the following main files and directories:

main.pdf
main_ss.htm
'MAIN_DH.HTM;1'
These files contain the CD-ROM Home Page. If you are using HTML browser on SUN or SGI, the home page is main_ss.htm. If you are using HTML browser on HP or DEC, the home page is 'MAIN_DH.HTM;1'. If you are using Acrobat Reader alone, the home page is main.pdf. From these home pages, you can traverse links to view individual conference papers.

acrobat/
In this directory are subdirectories for each platform for which the Acrobat Reader is provided. Acrobat Readers are provided for the following UNIX platforms: SUN SunOS, SUN Solaris, SGI IRIX, and HP HP-UX. Please read the section on "Installing Acrobat Reader" for installation instructions.

papers/1997/dac97/

This directory contain the following subdirectories:

pdffiles/
This directory contains papers in Portable Document Format (PDF). Files in this format can be viewed and printed using the Acrobat Reader. The file names reflect the session in which the paper appeared.

psfiles/
This directory contains papers in PostScript format. The file names reflect the session in which the paper appeared. The files can be viewed with a PostScript viewer and can be printed (see below for problems in printing).

htmfiles/sun_sgi or HTMFILES/DEC_HP/
For users of an HTML browser, index files are provided in HTML format. The conference proceedings on CD-ROM can be accessed using Netscape or Mosaic and a PostScript viewer (such as GhostScript)

The CD-ROM home page in HTML format contains links that allow you to access files in these three directories, namely, "pdffiles", "psfiles" and "htmfiles". The "pdffiles" and "psfiles" directory contains the PDF and PostScript files, respectively, for papers in the proceedings and the "htmfiles" directory contains two parallel sub-directories: "DEC_HP" and "sun_sgi". Each of these subdirectories contains a set of HTML files (with .htm extension). Depending on the machine that you are using, you should access the HTML files in either the "DEC_HP" or "sun_sgi" directory. This is taken care of if you access the correct CD-ROM Home Page, i.e. either "main_ss.htm" or "'MAIN_DH.HTM;1'" according to your UNIX platform.

If you have Acrobat Reader on your platform, you only need to be concerned with the "pdffiles" directories. Similarly, the main.pdf contains all the necessary links to file in the "pdffiles" directory. See "Accessing the CD" section, below, for more details.

Mounting the CD

To access the files, you have to create a directory for mount point. In the following, we assume that the directory "/cdrom" is the mount point. You will need to have root privileges to mount a file system. The CD-ROM should work on UNIX platforms such as Sun, SGI, DEC, HP and Linux. The following are the commands that can be used for mounting the CD-ROM:

Sun:

For Sun systems, the device name for the CD-ROM drive is likely to be "/dev/sr0". However, depending on the system setup, it could possibly be another device name. To mount the CD-ROM drive, you have to specify the file system type as hsfs:

% mount -rt hsfs /dev/sr0 /cdrom

The "r" option specifies that the device is "read only" and the "t" option specifies the file system type which in this case is "hsfs". Note that the above is for the SunOS operating system. For Solaris, it should be mounted automatically when you insert the CD-ROM. Otherwise, try the following command:

% mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/sr0 /cdrom

Please verify the device name /dev/sr0 with your system administrator. The "-o ro" option specifies that the device is read only.

HP:

% mount -rt cdfs /dev/dsk/cdrom /cdrom

Note that the file system type in HP machine is cdfs. Again, the device name for the CD-ROM drive could be different.

SGI:

% mount -t iso9660 /dev/scsi/sc0d6l0 /cdrom

The device name "sc0d6l0" refers to scsi controller 0 ("sc0") and scsi device 6 ("d6"). You will need to change these numbers if your CD-ROM drive is attached differently.

DEC:

% mount -r -t cdfs /dev/rz4c /cdrom

Note that there is an option "-o noversion" that can strip off extensions from version strings on MIPS and ALPHA and convert upper-case filenames to lower-case filenames on ALPHAs. I would not recommend this option for DEC MIPS since the links in the HTML files residing on "DEC_HP" assume the presence of the version strings. If you use this option for DEC ALPHAs, you have to access the CD using the "sun_sgi" directory. Again, the device name could be different.

Linux:

% mount -rt iso9660 /dev/sr0 /cdrom

Linux also support various non-scsi CD-ROM drives. For example, Mitsumi drive has a device name of /dev/mcd.

Accessing the CD

There are two sets of HTML files, each residing on "sun_sgi" and "DEC_HP". As the directory names imply, HTML files on "sun_sgi" are for SUN and SGI (in fact, Linux as well) workstations and HTML files on "DEC_HP" are for HP and DEC machines. The reason for having two sets of HTML files is that drivers on different UNIX machines map the filenames on the CD differently. SUN, SGI and Linux machines map the filenames to lower-case whereas HP and DEC map the filenames to upper-case.

In addition, filenames on HP machines are appended with version strings. Without the "-o noversion" option, DEC also appends the filenames with version strings. For example, the file "main_ss.htm" will appear as "MAIN_SS.HTM;1" on HP and DEC machines. As a result, it is necessary to provide two parallel directories. In the "sun_sgi" directory, the links specify filenames using lower-case characters. The links in the "DEC_HP" directory are specified by filenames of UPPER-CASE characters with version strings ";1"

. Hence, it is important to check how your machine performs the mapping. Simply list the directory "/cdrom" using the "ls" command. If the file names appear in capital letters with ";1" extension, you should use the set of HTML files on "DEC_HP". Otherwise, you should use the set of HTML files on "sun_sgi"

. Similarly, the file "main.pdf" (which is a mirror of the "main_ss.htm" file) will appear as "main.pdf" on SUN and SGI machines but as "MAIN.PDF;1" on a HP machine. It is due to this mapping that the links in main.pdf might not work on a HP machine. However, the links in "MAIN_DH.HTM;1" takes this mapping into consideration and you may still view individual papers in PDF format if you invoke Acrobat Reader via links in the "MAIN_DH.HTM;1" and related files from Mosaic or Netscape

.

Accessing the Home Page

You should browse the conference proceedings starting from the CD-ROM Home Page which is on main_ss.htm for SUN and SGI machines and 'MAIN_DH.HTM;1' for DEC and HP machines. Assuming that you mount your CD-ROM drive on directory "/cdrom", the following commands allow you to browse the conference proceedings using Mosaic (note that you could invoke Mosaic by xmosaic or mosaic depending on the setup at your site; on some systems you may need to leave out the -home):

% Mosaic -home /cdrom/main_ss.htm

or

% Mosaic -home '/cdrom/MAIN_DH.HTM;1'

or

% Mosaic /cdrom/main_ss.htm

or

% Mosaic '/cdrom/MAIN_DH.HTM;1

' Note that for HP or DEC machines, you need the quotes since semicolon is a separator on UNIX. You also need to modify/create .mime.types file in your home directory. Please read the "About Net Browsers and Viewers" Section for more details

. In Mosaic, all hypertext links are colored and/or underlined.

To traverse a link, move the mouse to the colored/underlined text. The destination of the link will be displayed at the bottom of the Mosaic window. Click on the highlighted text to go to the destination file. For each conference paper, there are links to its abstract, its PDF file and its Postscript file. Please traverse the "Tips on Getting Started" link on the CD-ROM Home Page.

If the selected destination file is a PostScript file, an external postscript viewer is spawned to display the file. If the selected file is a PDF file, an Acrobat reader is invoked instead. Please read the "About Net Browsers and Viewers" section on how to customize the external viewers for Postscript and PDF file. The section also contains information on how you may customize your Mosaic interface through the X resources.

If you are on SUN SunOS, SUN Solaris and SGI IRIX, you may use Acrobat Reader to browse the entire proceedings. Assuming that you have installed the Acrobat Reader, do the following:

% acroread /cdrom/main.pdf

If the above filename formats do not work on your machine, please send email to either Chong-Chian Koh (kohcc@cs.ucla.edu) or Kathy Preas (kathy@cse.psu.edu). We would like to make the CD workable on as many UNIX platforms as possible and your input will help us greatly to achieve this goal.

Installing Acrobat Reader

In order for you to view the PDF files, you have to install the the Acrobat Reader. The acrobat directory contains the tar file (and in some cases, readme file, too) for the Acrobat Reader for various UNIX platforms such as SUN SunOS, SUN Solaris, HP HP-UX and SGI IRIX. For Microsoft Windows environment, please refer to winread.wri. There is a readme file for MAC users, but the file is hidden if you are not using MAC. At this point, we do not have an Acrobat Reader for DEC user.

The directory /cdrom/acrobat/unix contains the subdirectory "reader", which correspond to Acrobat Reader. This subdirectory contain installation script, installation guide, and several tar files for the installation on the UNIX platform. Please refer to the readme_u.txt file in /cdrom/acrobat for the details on installation. You should also refer to the installation guide in /cdrom/acrobat/unix/reader for more details. In general, you should simply invoke the installation script "install" or "INSTALL;1" from /cdrom/acrobat/unix/reader. Alternatively, you can copy the installation script, the license agreement file, the platform-independent tar file and the platform-specific tar file to a temporary directory such as /tmp or a sub-directory, say ~/acroread under your home directory, and then invoke the installation script from the temporary directory. Again, please note that for HP user, you have to use the single quote "'" to delimit your filename when you copy the files. For example,

% cp '/cdrom/ACROBAT/UNIX/READER/HPUXR.TAR;1' ~/acrobat/hpuxr.tar

You have to customize your HTML browser so that it can invoke Acrobat Reader when you click on a link to a PDF file. Note that we do not provide a PDF viewer for DEC platform in the CD-ROM. Also, due to the mechanism of the HTML browser, when you clicked on a link to a PDF file on a HTML file, the PDF file on the CD-ROM is copied to a temporary directory on your disk/cache. As a result, the links in a PDF file retrieved by a HTML brower will not work correctly. If you clicked on a link in such a PDF file, you will get an error message saying that the destination file is missing.

For the links on PDF files to function correctly, we suggest that you use the Acrobat Reader as the browser (instead of Netscape or Mosaic) and use /cdrom/main.pdf as the CD-ROM Home Page to start with.

% acroread /cdrom/main.pdf

Again, you should traverse the link on "Tips on Getting Started" in the PDF CD-ROM Home Page first.

About Net Browsers and Viewers

1. Home Page

You can use the `-home' command-line flag or set the X resource `Mosaic*homeDocument' to the URL of your choice.

2. PostScript Viewer and Acrobat Reader

There are two files where you can specify (a) the mapping of file extensions (e.g., ".ps", ".PS;1") to a file type (postscript file, in this case) and (b) the mapping of an external viewer for the specified file type (e.g., ghostview for postscript file). An extension map is a configuration file that maps file extensions to MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) types. In general, Mosaic is configured to map file extensions ".ps" to MIME type application/PostScript. You should not have to worry about extension mapping. However, for HP and DEC machines with the version string, you should include this line in your .mime.types file (if you already have one) or create the file in your home directory:

% more ~/.mime.types

application/postscript PS;1 eps ps

application/x-pdf PDF;1 pdf

The order of the extensions is crucial. Note that we also include a line to map file extension ".pdf" to file type PDF.

A mailcap file allows you to map MIME types to external viewers. To map MIME type for application/postscript and application/x-pdf to the PostScript viewer "pageview", and Acrobat Reader, respectively, add the following line to ".mailcap" file in your home directory:

% more ~/.mailcap

application/postscript; pageview %s

application/x-pdf; acroread %s

Make sure that the external viewers specified in your ".mailcap" file are in your path.

3. NCSA Mosaic X Resources

There are several X resources that could be set to customize your Mosaic interface. Select "Manual" under the help menu. This brings you to the documentation on NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System. Select to browse the Frequently Asked Questions list. Under the information for Interface stuff, there is information on customizing the interface. In particular, I find that it is useful to size your Mosaic window to certain height and width so that you do not have to scroll on the first CD-ROM home page.

% more ~/.Xdefaults

Mosaic*defaultWidth: 700

Mosaic*defaultHeight: 800

Trouble Shooting

We have done the following testing on CD-ROMs:

Platform Status

SUN tested extensively

Linux on PC limited testing on Slackware release

SGI Indy limited testing

DEC limited testing

HP limited testing

If you are unable to bring up an external viewer (such as ghostview). It could be due to several reasons: the viewer is not in your path, your machine does not support ghostview, your .mailcap and .mime.types files are not set correctly, etc.

In addition, each PostScript viewer (ghostscript, ghostview and pageview) may have a set of PostScript files that it cannot display well, i.e., a PostScript file may be displayed by viewer X but not by viewer Y. Due to font sizing, a few papers may have overlapping columns on Ghostview. This problem can be overcome by increasing the magnification.

Some papers do not appear well in the viewer because they were scanned in, mainly due to the following reasons:

1. They cannot be distilled to produce PDF files.

2. There are problems (printing, viewing etc) with the original PostScript file submitted by the author(s). These are mainly due to incompatibility of the software used to generate the PostScript file.

3. No electronic version is submitted by the author.

There are papers that do not appear well in the Acrobat Reader. This is due to the fact that the papers did not use the recommended Type 1 fonts. Instead, the papers used Type 3 fonts.

Most of the files are printable. Some files cannot not printed because they are too large for the print buffer. You should print large files using 'lpr' with '-s' option as follows (so that instead of sending a huge file to the printer spooler, a symbolic link to the original ps file is used):

% lpr -Pprinter -s filename.ps

where 'printer' is the printer name and 'filename.ps' is the filename. Papers with "scn" in the filename have been scanned.

If you are printing the postscript files from HP or DEC machines, please remember to enclose the filenames with quotes.

Another common problem is that there is insufficient disk space for Mosaic when you try to access a big file. This is due to system setting that normally do not leave enough disk space in the /usr/tmp directory. You may specify a temporary directory (instead of the default /usr/tmp directory used by Mosaic) under your home directory, assuming that you have enough user disk space. Simply set the environment variable $TMPDIR to point to the temporary directory that you have set up. The following command is for csh user. Consult man page for your shell on how to set up environment variable.

% setenv TMPDIR $HOME/tmp

FTP and Web sites for Mosaic, Netscape, Postscript Viewers and Acrobat Reader

You may get the source and binary of Mosaic from

ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu:/Web/Mosaic

The binary versions of Netscape can be obtained from

http://home.netscape.com

The postscript viewers (gs, ghostview) can be obtained from

prep.ai.mit.edu:/pub/gnu

ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu:/Web/Mosaic

The Acrobat Reader can be obtained from

http://www.adobe.com/Acrobat/freeread.html