The Control Panel
If you cannot see one then you have called the book (or index) from some other Web-site (like a search-engine) and it will be displayed in its 'native' format and all the ready-to-hand control features will not be available. Try going to the original site atwww.ex.ac.uk/trol/grol/
Of course, you may have the Control Panel and it doesn't work. This probably means that your browser cannot handle the JavaScript, or it is disabled.
Microsoft's SP2 can be a nuisance in this case, though it is easily resolved.
Browsers
Because of some of the commands used in the program which drives all this, it does need later versions of browsers to ensure it works as intended.
This was developed and tested on Internet Explorer 6.0 and Netscape 7.0 and Firefox.
Viewing Area
In this, it is undoubtedly of benefit to have as large a viewing area as possible. To that end, look to clicking 'off' any unnecessary menus or information panels (Favourites) which are often placed on the left-hand side of the screen.
And do not forget the F11 key which quickly switches off some of the top and bottom bars.
Auto-Scrolling
Can be a bit of a problem. The 'best' speed depends not only on the reader's reading speed, but also on the text density. A long descriptive passage takes more time to read than several, well-divided lines of speech.
The program makes no allowance for that.
Of course the Auto-Scroll can always be turned off (click on 'Stop') and the scrolling done by hand, using either the wheel on the mouse (if it has one) or the right-hand scroll bar.
The business of actually reading a document which is 'on the move' in front of you does take a little while to get used to.
Formatting
'Extreme' settings can produce some unfortunate results in appearance, especially if there are illustrations present.
For example try setting the LARGEST page width, with the smallest type size.
The optional settings made available here have been decided by assuming that there is some balance between them.
Margins
This is merely an attempt to make the on-screen 'page' look like that of a printed book where the text is separated by margins from the edges of the page. If using a small screen, the zero option may need to be used to get a reasonable line length.
Page Colour
0 means NO colour (= white).
1 means the page will be coloured with a pre-set colour. The colour will depend upon the story. A different colour is used for each author.
Finally
It is meant to be useful to the reader, and to make the experience of reading books on line as pleasant as possible. To this end it will be necessary to experiment with different settings to find which produces the most satisfactory results.
But, once those settings have been made they will continue to work throughout that session and, provided they are remembered, can quickly be set up the next time.
For instance, I always start off by setting (from top to bottom) 2, 6, 3, 3, 2, 1, 1 and press F11. Then, (except for the scrolling) rarely change anything throughout the session. But I do work on a large (1280 by 800) screen and always clear everything else out of the way.
Unfortunately there is, as yet, no way of saving your personal choices.
Control Panel Options
The above remarks apply to the A-type Controls (which is the default option). Settings on the B-type Controls will be different.
Why?
Why bother with this anyway? What is the point of it all? A brief account of how and why this project came into being can be found here.
[Acrobat Reader will be needed for this PDF file.]
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