Quick Notes about Mosaic

Mosaic, the program you are running, is a hypertext viewer, capable of displaying information in various forms from many far-flung places on the Internet. This year, 15-211 will make use of Mosaic to organize much of the class material.

The primary feature of Mosaic documents are ``links,'' which take you to other documents, or display useful information, when clicked on. Try this now: click here.

Hopefully, you found your way back to this page after clicking on the above link. (Either you did, since you are reading this, or you ignored the instructions and just kept reading...)

Let me tell you about just a couple of the features of Mosaic you'll want to know about to make your life easier.

Hotlist
You'll often have documents you wish to get to quickly, without navigating your way through a bunch of links, or having to use the URL command to explicitly type in a document name. A good example is the 15-211 home page: since you are going to be using this page a fair amount, you want to add it to your ``hotlist'' of often used Mosaic documents.

Try this now: pull down the ``Navigate'' menu from the top of the screen, and choose ``Add Current To Hotlist.'' To display your hotlist, choose ``Hotlist...'' from the Navigate menu. Once your hotlist has been displayed, highlight the title of document you want to go to, by clicking on it. Then press the ``Go To'' button.

Whenever you find a document you think you may want to read again, you should add it to your hotlist. There are additional buttons in the hotlist window that let you clean up your hotlist, if you're no longer interested in a document.

Printing
You may want to print out a Mosaic document (perhaps this one). To try this, select ``Print'' from the File menu. Assuming you're in an Andrew cluster, click on the ``Format'' field, and select ``PostScript'' to get nice output on the printer.

How Did I Get Here?
From the Navigate menu, you can select ``Window History'' to get a listing of the chain of documents you waded through to get where you are now.

Saving A File
If you'd like to save the contents of the current screen as a file, you can choose ``Save As...'' from the file menu. For example, try the following: click here to view a short program, and then try to save this program in a file. When you select ``Save As'' you will want to use the format ``Plain Text.'' After saving the program, verify that just a plain text file was saved in your directory.

Additional Features
Mosaic has its own online help document: from the Help menu at the far upper-right of the screen, select ``Manual'' and then click on the ``User's Guide'' link. Or ask one of the TA's, or a consultant for help.

baraff@cs.cmu.edu
Mon Aug 29 19:50:20 EDT 1994