NCSA Mosaic Resources

Herein are detailed the available NCSA Mosaic resources. (This information applies to the last public release of NCSA Mosaic at any time; see here for information on versions.)

Note that for each of the resources listed below, the class name is the same as the resource name except that the first character is capitalized.

Functional Resources

annotationsOnTop: Boolean

Flag to indicate whether inlined document annotation hyperlinks are prepended to the document (if true) or postpended (if false). Default is false.

autoPlaceWindows: Boolean

If set to false, new Document View windows will not be automatically positioned by the program itself (but it's still up to your window manager just how they're placed). Default is true.

binaryTransferMode: Boolean

This resource is explained elsewhere. Default is false, and you probably don't want to change this.

catchPriorAndNext: Boolean (new for 1.1)

This resource controls whether use of the keys Prior and Next (Page Up and Page Down on most keyboards) are explicitly caught in the Document View window and passed to the vertical scrollbar or whether the normal Motif scrolled window mechanism is relied upon to do that automatically. Default is false, since that's how things are supposed to work, but if you find that Page Up/Page Down aren't doing their jobs for you, set this resource to true. (See also information on hotkeys.)

confirmExit: Boolean

Whether NCSA Mosaic will pop up a dialog box to confirm exiting the program when the 'Exit Program' menu option is chosen. Default is true.

defaultAuthorName: string

String to use as your fullname (e.g., John Q. Public). Your fullname is normally stored in the system password file, and Mosaic will extract it from that if this resource is NULL; else the value of this resource will be used. Default is NULL.

defaultHeight: integer

Default height in pixels for a Document View window. Default is 680.

defaultHotlistFile: string

Name of file to store the default hotlist (or list of bookmarks). Default is ".mosaic-hotlist-default"; the value of the environment variable $HOME will be prepended to this string.

displayURLsNotTitles: Boolean

If true, URL's will be displayed everywhere document titles are usually displayed. Default is false.

defaultWidth: integer

Default width in pixels for a Document View window. Default is 620.

fancySelections: Boolean

If true, cut and paste from the Document View window will be done with fancy selections enabled in the HTML widget, which will result in underlined headers, bulleted lists, and so on. If false, normal selection behavior will be used. Default is false. (Note that this can be changed, per window, on the fly.)

gethostbynameIsEvil: Boolean

If you are running on a Sun set up such that, when it tries to find out it's own full hostname via gethostbyname(), it coredumps, then you should set this resource to true. Default is false.

globalHistoryFile: string

Name of file to store the global history of all documents visited from session to session. Default is ".mosaic-global-history"; the value of the environment variable $HOME will be prepended to this string.

globalWindowPerDocument: Boolean

If true, there is a single window-per-document setting for the entire application; if false, each Document View window can have its own setting. Default is true.

gunzipCommand: string

Command to use to uncompress gzip'd files (files with an extension of '.z'). Default is "gunzip". (Gunzip can be obtained from prep.ai.mit.edu in /pub/gnu.)

homeDocument: string

Document to access on program startup. Default is "http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html". See also information on specifying your home document.

initialWindowIconic: Boolean

If set to true, the first Document View window opened (when the program starts) will be iconified. Default is false.

mailCommand: string

Name of command used for the 'Mail To' menu option. This command is expected to accept the command line flag '-s string' to specify the subject of the outgoing message. Default is "Mail".

personalAnnotationDirectory: string

Name of directory in which to store personal annotations (as well as the log file of all personal annotations currently in existence). Default is ".mosaic-personal-annotations"; the value of the environment variable $HOME will be prepended to this string. (If the directory so named does not exist, it will be created; however, intermediate directories, if any are named, will not be created.)

printCommand: string

Name of command used (by default) for the 'Print' menu option. This command is expected to accept a single argument -- the name of the file to print. Default is "lpr". (Note that this can be changed on the fly via the 'Print' option's dialog box.)

recordCommandLocation: string

Location (full path name) of the command used to record audio annotations (on Sun, SGI, and HP platforms). Default is "/usr/sbin/recordaiff" on SGI, "/usr/demo/SOUND/record" on Sun, and "/usr/audio/bin/srecorder" on HP. If the named command does not exist when Mosaic is started, audio annotations will be disabled (the menu entry will be made insensitive).

recordCommand: string

Command used to record audio annotations -- this is the full command, using the command named in recordCommandLocation as the first word. Default is "recordaiff -n 1 -s 8 -r 8000" on SGI, "record" on Sun, "srecorder -au" on HP. The command thus named is expected to accept a single additional argument: the filename of the new audio file; the command is also expected to correctly terminate recording when sent a SIGINT.

tmpDirectory: string (new for version 1.1)

Name of directory in which to store temporary files generated by Mosaic. This directory should have plenty of space, ideally at least 10 or 20 megabytes, in case you happen to pull down a very large data file. Setting this resource is equivalent to using the command-line flag -tmpdir or setting the environment variable TMPDIR.

trackVisitedAnchors: Boolean

If true, visited anchors (anchors pointing to documents that have previously been viewed) will be displayed with a different style than anchors that have not yet been visited. Default is true. (On slow machines, changing this resource to false may substantially improve Mosaic's performance.)

uncompressCommand: string

Command to use to uncompress compressed files (files with an extension of '.Z'). Default is "uncompress".

useGlobalHistory: Boolean

If true, a global history of everywhere you visit is automatically stored. (This history is used to shade anchors different colors based on whether you've visited the corresponding documents or not, if resource trackVisitedAnchors is set to true) Default is true.

warpPointerForIndex: Boolean

If true, the pointer will be warped to the keyword entry area when accessing a searchable document. (Since NCSA Mosaic is point-to-focus, this automatically gives input focus for searchable documents.) Default is false.

windowPerDocument: Boolean

If true, a new window should be created for each accessed document. Default is false. (Note that this can be changed, per window, on the fly.)

xtermCommand: string

Name of command used to start a terminal window for a telnet session. Default is "xterm" on most platforms; "aixterm -v" on IBM AIX 3.x systems.

Multimedia Resources

Mosaic includes limited support for multimedia functionality: basically, if you point Mosaic at an image, a sound file, or something similar, it will have a pretty good chance of doing the right thing. The following resources control the viewers (specific file handling clients) that Mosaic will invoke for particular file types.

Note that setting the value of any of these resources to dump will cause the appropriate binary files to be dumped straight to disk rather than passed through a viewer. (You will be prompted for a filename when the file is transferred.)

aiffPlayerCommand: string

Command to which AIFF-format sound files are passed. Default is 'sfplay', which is SGI-specific (simply because we don't know of a general-purpose multiplatform AIFF player).

audioPlayerCommand: string

Command to which Sun/NeXT-format sound files are passed. Default is 'showaudio' (which can be found in the metamail distribution at thumper.bellcore.com in /pub/nsb).

dviViewerCommand: string

Command to which DVI-format document files are passed. (DVI is the page layout language generated by TeX and LaTeX.) Default is 'xdvi' (which can be found at export.lcs.mit.edu in /contrib).

gifViewerCommand: string

Command to which GIF-format images are passed. Default is 'xv' (which can be found at export.lcs.mit.edu in /contrib).

hdfViewerCommand: string (new for 1.1)

Command to which HDF-format data files are passed. Default is 'collage -load'; unfortunately, a version of Collage that recognizes the '-load' flag is not yet publicly available. Contact mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu for details.

jpegViewerCommand: string

Command to which JPEG-format images are passed. Default is 'xv'.

mimeViewerCommand: string

Command to which MIME-format document files are passed. Default is 'xterm -e metamail'. (Metamail can be found at thumper.bellcore.com in /pub/nsb).

mpegViewerCommand: string

Command to which MPEG-format movie files are passed. Default is 'mpeg_play' (which can be found at postgres.berkeley.edu in /pub/multimedia/mpeg).

postscriptViewerCommand: string

Command to which PostScript documents are passed. Default is 'dump' (the previous default was 'ghostview', which can be obtained from prep.ai.mit.edu in /pub/gnu; see here for details on why ghostview isn't the default).

rgbViewerCommand: string

Command to which RGB-format images are passed. Default is 'ipaste' on SGI's, 'xv' on non-SGI's (since xv 3.00 supports RGB images on any X platform).

tiffViewerCommand: string

Command to which TIFF-format images are passed. Default is 'xv'.

xwdViewerCommand: string

Command to which XWD-format images are passed. Default is 'xwud -in'. (Xwud is a standard X utility.)

Visual Resources

The following resources actually belong to the HTML widget used in the Document View window, so you should specify them in your .Xdefaults file as follows: XMosaic*anchorColor: cyan

anchorColor: color

Color to shade anchors whose corresponding documents haven't been previously visited. Default is blue3.

visitedAnchorColor: color

Color to shade anchors whose corresponding documents have been previously visited. Default is violetred4.

activeAnchorFG: color

Color to shade anchors that are in the process of being activated. Default is red.

activeAnchorBG: color

Color to shade the background of anchors that are in the process of being activated. Default is grey80 (the same color as the application's background).

anchorUnderlines: integer

This can be one of {0, 1, 2, 3}, and indicates the number of lines to draw underneath unvisited anchors. Default is 1.

visitedAnchorUnderlines: integer

This can be one of {0, 1, 2, 3}, and indicates the number of lines to draw underneath visited anchors. Default is 1.

dashedAnchorUnderlines: Boolean

If true, lines drawn under unvisited anchors will be dashed. Default is false.

dashedVisitedAnchorUnderlines: Boolean

If true, lines drawn under visited anchors will be dashed. Default is true.

colorsPerInlinedImage: integer

Number of unique colors to allocate per inlined image; default is 50. Note that this has no bearing on images that are displayed externally to NCSA Mosaic, e.g. GIF images passed to the viewer named by resource gifViewerCommand.

percentVerticalSpace: integer

The height of vertical space between paragraphs, between headers and paragraphs, etc., expressed as a percentage of the normal line height. Default is 90.

Font Resources

Font resources are also resources that belong to the HTML widget, so the above note applies here too. Note that fonts can be changed dynamically from the Document View Options menu.

font: font

Font used in normal formatted text. Default is "-adobe-times-medium-r-normal-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

italicFont: font

Font used in italic formatted text. Default is "-adobe-times-medium-i-normal-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

boldFont: font

Font used in bold formatted text. Default is "-adobe-times-bold-r-normal-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

fixedFont: font

Font used in fixed (typewriter style) formatted text. Default is "-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

header1Font: font

Font used in level 1 headers. Default is "-adobe-times-bold-r-normal-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

header2Font: font

Font used in level 2 headers. Default is "-adobe-times-bold-r-normal-*-18-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

header3Font: font

Font used in level 3 headers. Default is "-adobe-times-bold-r-normal-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

header4Font: font

Font used in level 4 headers. Default is "-adobe-times-bold-r-normal-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

header5Font: font

Font used in level 5 headers. Default is "-adobe-times-bold-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

header6Font: font

Font used in level 6 headers. Default is "-adobe-times-bold-r-normal-*-10-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

addressFont: font

Font used in addresses. Default is "-adobe-times-medium-i-normal-*-17-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

plainFont: font

Font used in plaintext regions or preformatted documents. Default is "-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".

listingFont: font

Font used in listing regions. Default is "-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1".