Quick Notes about Mosaic

15-211 will be making use of the Web to organize much of the class material. The Web is a collection of hypertext documents at various locations, connected by "links", which take you from one document to another. For instance, you probably clicked on a link to reach here. Mosaic is a hypertext viewer that you can use to look at and navigate though all this information. Another popular viewer is "Netscape". You can use whatever viewer you'd like to monitor the 15-211 Web pages.

This document describes Mosaic, and specifically a couple features 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.

By baraff@cs.cmu.edu modified by avrim@cs.cmu.edu
Last modification date: 1/11/96