There are three colored buttons in the menu bar of the viewer. The left-facing arrow button (back) will return to the previous topic shown in the window. The right-facing arrow button (forward) will advance to the next topic, if the back button has been used. The Stop button will stop HTTP transfers in progress.
There are four drop-down menus in the menu bar: File, which contains basic commands for loading and printing, Options, which contains commands for setting display attributes, Bookmarks, which allows saving frequently used references, and Help which provides documentation.
The Open button in the File menu pops up a dialog into which a new keyword, URL, or file name can be entered. The Open File button brings up the file manager. The Ok button (green octagon) on the file browser will load the selected file into the viewer (the file should be a viewable file). The file can also be dragged into the viewer from the file manager.
The Save button in the File menu allows the text of the current window to be saved in a file. This functionality is also provided by the Print button. The saved text is pure ASCII.
The Print button brings up a pop-up which allows the user to send the help text to a printer, or to a file. The format of the text is set by the drop-down menu, with the current setting indicated on the menu button. The choices are PostScript in four fonts (Times, Helvetica, New Century Schoolbook, and Lucida Bright), HTML, or plain text. If the To File button is active, output goes to that file, otherwise the command string is executed to send output to a printer. If the characters ``%s'' appear in the command string, they are replaced with the temporary print file name, otherwise the temporary file name is appended to the string.
The Reload button in the File menu will re-read the input file and redisplay the contents. This can be useful when writing new help text or HTML files, as it will show changes made to the input file. However, if you edit a ``.hlp'' file, the internally cached offsets for the topics below the editing point will be wrong, and will not display correctly. When developing a help text topic, placing it in a separate file will avoid this problem. If the displayed object is a web page, the page will be redisplayed from the disk cache if it is enabled, rather than being downloaded again.
The Quit button in the File menu removes the help window.
The Search button in the Options menu brings up a dialog which solicits a regular expression to use as a search key into the help database. The regular expression syntax follows POSIX 1003.2 extended format (roughly that used by the Unix egrep command). The search is case-insensitive. When the search is complete, a new display appears, with the database entries which contained a match listed in the ``References'' field. The library functions which implement the regular expression evaluation differ slightly between systems. Further information can be found in the Unix manual pages for ``regex''.
The Set Font button in the Options menu will bring up a font selection pop-up. One can choose a typeface from among those listed in the left panel. The base size can be selected in the right panel. There are two separate font families used by the viewer: the normal, proportional-spaced font, and a fixed-pitch font for preformatted and ``typewriter'' text. The latter does not actually have to be fixed-pitch, however preformatted columns will not line up unless this is so. Pressing Apply Font will set the currently selected font as the viewer's proportional font, and Apply Fixed Font will set the currently selected font as the viewers ``fixed'' font. In either case, the display will be redrawn using the new font. The new font selection will be updated in the .mozyrc file if it exists, so that subsequent windows will use the new font.
The Filter page in the popup can be used to limit the choices. In particular, if you want a large font, selecting only Scalable in Font Types eliminates the ragged-looking bitmap fonts from the selection. One can also limit the choices to monospaced fonts when selecting the fixed-pitch font.
A disk cache of downloaded pages and images is maintained. The cache is located in the user's home directory under a subdirectory named ``.wr_cache''. A file named ``directory'' in this directory contains a human-readable listing of the cache files and the original URLs. This directory may also contain a file named ``cookies'' which contains a list of cookies received from web sites. The cache files are named ``wr_cacheN''" where N is an integer. The listing consists of a line with internal data, followed by data for the cache files. Each such line has three columns. The first column indicates the file number N. The second column is 0 if the wr_cacheN file exists and is complete, 1 otherwise. The third column is the source URL for the file. The number of files saved is limited, defaulting to 64. The cache only pertains to files obtained through HTTP transfer.
A page will not be downloaded if it exists in the cache, unless the modification time of the page is newer than the modification time of the cache file.
The Don't Cache button in the Options menu will disable caching of downloaded pages and images.
The Clear Cache button in the Options menu will clear the internal references to the cache. The files, however, are not cleared.
The Reload Cache button in the Options menu will clear and reload the internal cache references from the files that presently exist in the cache directory.
The Show Cache button in the Options menu brings up a listing of the URLs in the internal cache. Clicking on one of the URLs in the listing will load that page or image into the viewer. This is particularly useful on a system that is not continuously on-line. One can access the pages while on-line, then read them later, from cache, without being on-line.
Support is provided for Netscape-style cookies. Cookies are small fragments if information stored by the browser and transmitted to or received from the web site. There is a No Cookies button in the help window Options menu to disable sending and receiving cookies. The NoCookies keyword in the .mozyrc file (see below) can be set to 1 to disable cookies by default, or 0 for the default (enabled) behavior. With cookies, it is possible to view the New York Times web site, for example, which requires registration. It is also possible to view some commerce sites that require cookies. There is no encryption, so it is not a good idea to send sensitive info like credit card numbers, though.
The No Cookies button will disable sending and receiving of cookies, if set.
Image support is provided for gif, jpeg, png, tiff, xbm, and xpm. Animated gifs are supported as well. Images found on the local file system are always displayed immediately (unless debugging options are set in the startup file). The treatment of images that must be downloaded is set by a button group in the Options menu. One and only one of these choices is active. If No Images is chosen, images that aren't local will not be displayed at all. If Sync Images is chosen, images are downloaded as they are encountered. All downloading will be complete before the page is displayed. If Delayed Images is chosen, images are downloaded after the page is displayed. The display will be updated as the images are received. If Progressive Images is chosen, images are downloaded after the page is displayed, and images are displayed in sections as downloading progresses.
There are choices as to how anchors (the clickable references) are displayed. If the Anchor Plain button in the Options menu is selected, anchors will be displayed with standard blue text. If Anchor Buttons is selected, a button metaphor will be used to display the anchors. If Anchor Underline is selected, the anchor will consist of underlined blue text. The underlining style can be changed in the ``mozyrc'' startup file. One and only one of these three choices is active. In addition, if Anchor Highlight is selected, the anchors are highlighted when the pointer passes over them.
If the Bad HTML Warnings button in the Options menu is active, messages about incorrect HTML format are emitted to standard output.
If the Freeze Animations button in the Options menu is active, active animations are frozen at the current frame. New animations will stop after the first frame is shown. This is for users who find animations distracting.
If the Log Transactions button in the Options menu is active, the header text emitted and received during HTTP transactions is printed on the terminal screen. This is for debugging and hacking.
The Bookmarks menu contains entries to add and delete entries, plus a list of entries. The entries, previously added by the user, are help keywords, file names, or URLs that can be accessed by selecting the entry. Thus, frequently accessed pages can be saved for convenient access. Pressing the Add button will add the page currently displayed in the viewer to the list. The next time the Bookmarks menu is displayed, the topic should appear in the menu. To remove a topic, the Delete button is pressed. Then, the menu is brought up again, and the item to delete is selected. This will remove the item from the menu. Selecting any of the other items in the menu will display the item in the viewer. The bookmark entries are saved in a file named ``bookmarks'' which is located in the same directory containing the cache files.