Installing the Fractal Science Kit Documentation
Follow these instructions to download and install the Fractal Science Kit documentation on your computer.
Before you install the documentation you must first install the Fractal Science Kit on your computer. If you have not yet installed the Fractal Science Kit on your computer, please follow the instructions given in Installing the Product and then return to this page to install the documentation.
The following instructions are written from the perspective of Microsoft Windows XP but Windows Vista users should have no trouble following along.
To install the product documentation, do the following:
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Download the documentation. Click on the Download link on the product web site, and follow the instructions on that page to download the documentation. The documentation is distributed as a zip file fskweb1_x.zip, where the x in the filename is the minor version number for the documentation. For example, the file fskweb1_2.zip would correspond to version 1.2. Note that the minor version number of the product is independent of that of the documentation and these generally do not match.
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Unzip the file fskweb1_x.zip. Select the file fskweb1_x.zip, and execute the Extract All... command on the File menu to unzip the file. On the Extraction Wizard, click Next twice, and then uncheck Show extracted files and click Finish. This creates a folder named fskweb1_x in the same folder as the zip file. You can remove fskweb1_x.zip now if you want to. On Windows Vista, this step may take up to 20 minutes! On Windows XP it takes less than a minute.
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Start the Fractal Science Kit application.
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Execute the Options... command on the Tools menu of the Fractal Window to open the Options Dialog.
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Set the Documentation Folder on the General tab of the Options Dialog to the new folder fskweb1_x. To do this, click the button labeled '...' to the right of the Documentation Folder field to open the Browse For Folder dialog, and navigate to, and select, the fskweb1_x folder that you created above, and click Ok. This populates the Documentation Folder field with the path to the fskweb1_x folder.
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Click Ok on the Options Dialog to save the Documentation Folder.
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Open the documentation by executing the Open Documentation... command on the Help menu of the Fractal Window.
Uninstalling the Documentation
To uninstall the Fractal Science Kit documentation, simply remove the folder named fskweb1_x that you created above. You can remove older versions of the documentation after you download and install a new version.
Internet Explorer
For those of you using Internet Explorer as your browser, an annoying warning is displayed by some versions of Internet Explorer when the 1st page is displayed. The message is displayed in a light yellow, rectangular strip, just above the documentation proper. The message states:
- To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has restricted this webpage from running scripts or ActiveX controls that could access your computer. Click here for options.
I am a little confused as to why this message appears since none of the documentation pages run any scripts or ActiveX controls. What's more the message does not appear when the same page is opened over the Internet. This annoying message will appear on every page of documentation you try to access unless you do the following:
- Click the left mouse button on the light yellow, rectangular strip.
- On the popup menu, select Allow Blocked Content...
- On the Security Warning dialog that pops up, click Yes.
This will clear up the problem for all pages you access during this session but the next time you open the documentation you will need to perform the same steps again.
I have looked for an explanation on the web and found that many people have encountered this same problem when viewing pages offline using Internet Explorer but I could find no justification for the message on a page without any scripts. I was also unable to find a satisfactory way to fix it. For those of you who may be saying "You simply need to place the Mark of the Web (MOTW) at the top of each page...", I tried this, and while it worked for the html pages in the documentation, the picture file links (jpg files) could no longer be accessed, presumably because they do not have the MOTW. While I could get around this by embedding each jpg file in its own html page, I would have to avoid using picture gallery and thumbnail controls since they do not support this. This would require a large number of additional files and make maintaining the documentation much more difficult so I opted to leave things as they are for now.