Installing and Configuring techexplorer

In this section we discuss installation and configuration details for techexplorer on various operating system platforms and browsers. Note that additional information is available in the Customization section.

General
Microsoft Windows

General
Plug-in
ActiveX Control
Internet Explorer Behavior

Macintosh

General
OS X
OS 9

Linux

General
Installation

Web server configuration

General

You must exit your web browser before installing this or any other browser plug-in. Plug-ins are registered when the browser starts, so you must exit and re-start your browser if you have not done so already.
If you are using Netscape Navigator, your cache size must be large enough. Look at the Edit | Preferences... | Advanced | Cache menu settings and make sure your memory cache is at least 1024 kilobytes and the disk cache is at least 5000 Kilobytes. If the settings are too small, techexplorer may fail to load multimedia files and "input" files.
Note that the install process, techexplorer dialogs, menus and the such will be different for each platform.

Microsoft Windows

General

Regarding fonts and symbols: techexplorer can use several different sets of fonts for finding the symbols it needs (for example, greek letters). See Customizing your techexplorer environment section for more information.

Plug-in

This plug-in is known to work with Microsoft Windows 32 bit versions of Netscape Navigator version 4. It may not work with pre-release (e.g., "beta" or "preview release") versions of Netscape Navigator. Many of the features of this plug-in are also available when used with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0. One major exception is the scripting interface where Netscape LiveConnect is used. Use the ActiveX control for techexplorer scripting in Internet Explorer. This plug-in further requires Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 (or greater).
If you have both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer installed you do not need to install techexplorer twice. Simply install the plug-in for Netscape Navigator. The installation will set up the necessary file extension associations and MIME type information in the system registry. Internet Explorer should be able to locate the plug-in when needed.
If you get a message from Microsoft Internet Explorer similar to

The data that the plugin requested, did not download successfully.

this simply means that techexplorer requested a file or image that is not present on the server. Netscape Navigator does not notify you in this way.

The actual plug-in file is called nptchexp.dll. There is no standalone executable file.

ActiveX Control

The techexplorer ActiveX control can be added and removed manually from the Windows NT/2000 registry as follows:

$(WINDIR)\System32\regsvr32.exe /v c:\Program Files\Integre\techexplorer Hypermedia Browser\Bin\Axtchexp.ocx
$(WINDIR)\System32\regsvr32.exe /u c:\Program Files\Integre\techexplorer Hypermedia Browser\Bin\Axtchexp.ocx

The techexplorer ActiveX control can be added and removed manually from the Windows 95/98/ME registry as follows:

$(WINDIR)\System\regsvr32.exe /v c:\Program Files\Integre\techexplorer Hypermedia Browser\Bin\Axtchexp.ocx
$(WINDIR)\System\regsvr32.exe /u c:\Program Files\Integre\techexplorer Hypermedia Browser\Bin\Axtchexp.ocx

Using a newer version of the techexplorer ActiveX control to display PowerPoint presentations that include an old version of techexplorer ActiveX control content will cause an error. When an ActiveX control is inserted into a PowerPoint document, PowerPoint will read the "type library" of the control and save it to a file with an .exd extension. (In the case of techexplorer AXTCHEXPLib.exd is the file name.) This enhances the speed of ActiveX control loading, but it will cause an error when anything in the type library is changed or recompiled. The work-around is to remove this .exd file from your TEMP directory or re-insert the control (which causes the loss of all the property settings).
See http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q199/8/30.ASP for more details.

Internet Explorer Behavior

The techexplorer MathML Internet Explorer Behavior requires version 5.5 or greater of Internet Explorer.

Macintosh

General

A PowerPC (PPC) processor is required and older processors are not supported.
In Internet Explorer loading a techexplorer document with an included file that is missing will eventually exhaust computer resources.
Some features in the Microsoft Windows version of techexplorer may not be available yet or fully and correctly implemented in this release. In particular:

Printing has been disabled in this release.
The About, Properties, and Options dialogs have some features that are not yet fully and correctly implemented in this release.
There is limited support for input boxes.

OS X

The Mac OS X edition is stored as a tarred bzip file (.tbz).
The plug-in is known to work with Mac OS X version 10.1 and newer. It has been tested with Safari 1.0 and later, with Netscape 7.1, and with Internet Explorer 5.2.

OS 9

The Mac Classic OS edition is stored as a self-extracting archive (.sea).
On Mac Classic OS the plug-in has been tested with Internet Explorer versions 4 and 5 as well as Netscape Navigator version 4.
Full LaTeX (.tex) and MathML (.mml) documents MAY not have the appropriate associations with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4. LaTeX and MathML embedded in HTML should work just fine. Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape do not have the issues regarding the file associations.
All the files in the Macintosh file system have a creator type and a file type. If the system does not find the application with that creator type then it looks at the file's extension. As a consequence files transferred between systems may not be associated with techexplorer. To resolve this change the file's creator type to ????.

Linux

General

This version of techexplorer has been tested with RedHat 9.0. It has been found to run reliably on other Linux installations; however, it has not been thoroughly tested on platforms other than RedHat Linux.
The following shared libraries must be present:
libXp.so.6, libXi.so.6, libXext.so.6, libXt.so.6, libX11.so.6, libSM.so.6, libICE.so.6, libm.so.6, libc.so.6, ld-linux.so.2.
This version supports only GIF and JPEG image formats.
Some features in the Microsoft Windows version of techexplorer may not be available yet or fully and correctly implemented in this release. In particular:

Property pages for Math and Symbols will be enabled in a later release.
A few character mappings are missing or wrong.
This version of the UNIX edition of techexplorer does not support cut/paste selection operations.

Support for the Mathematical Markup Language in this version requires that you associate the text/mathml MIME type with the .mml file extension. For example using Netscape open the applications property page by following the Edit | Preferences... | Navigator | Applications menu. Select and Edit the text/mathml entry. Make sure that the MIME Type is text/mathml and that the Suffixes is set to mml.

Installation

Download the techexplorer installation file to a temporary directory. The installation is available compressed by either bzip2 or gzip. The files are named te-linux-3.5.tbz2 for the bzipped version and te-linux.3.5.tgz for the gzipped version.
Un-compress this file in a shell window by issuing

gzip -d te-linux-3.5.tgz for the gzipped version or

bzip2 -d te-linux-3.5.tbz2 for the bzipped version.

Un-tar the resulting file by issuing

tar -xvf te-linux-3.5.tar

Techexplorer will unpack into the techexplorer-3.5 directory. Please read the README.txt file for further installation instructions.
Permissions: techexplorer executes with the same User ID as Netscape Navigator and must have read and write access to the $HOME/.mozilla/techexplorer directory and its contents. If necessary, you can change the file permission modes by using the chmod command. If you are using an AFS file system, the fs command may have to be used to set the required privileges. For example:

fs la $HOME/.netscape/techexplorer
fs sa $HOME/.netscape/techexplorer system:anyuser rl

Fonts and symbols: techexplorer ships with and uses a subset of the publicly available PostScript Type 1 version of the Computer Modern fonts from BlueSky Research and Y&Y, Inc., via the American Mathematical Society. To see if the fonts can be used correctly by techexplorer on your machine, type the following to the shell:

     xset fp default
     xset +fp $HOME/.mozilla/techexplorer/Fonts
     xset fp rehash

If techexplorer encounters a symbol in a document for which there is no character in the selected symbol font set, the symbol name is displayed in red, as in \hookLeftarrow.

You can display a font by invoking xfd:

xfd -fn -bluesky-cmbsy10-bold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-adobe-fontspecific

The X Window System server must have read access to the fonts files in order to render. Incorrect directory permissions will cause the above xset or xfd commands to fail. See above for more information on file permission modes. Several users have noted that, for their particular system, the "all others read" (chmod o+r $HOME/.mozilla/techexplorer/Fonts) permission flag must be set for the X Window System to access the font directory.
Font Path: techexplorer's font path information is stored in the $HOME/.mozilla/techexplorer/Cache/registry resource file. Font directories and font servers can be added via the "Font Path" property page or the registry file itself.
Font Server: Since the X server must have access to the techexplorer font path, remote X displays that do not share the techexplorer installation file system can not be used. This can be alleviated by running a font server on the techexplorer installation machine and adding this server to the remote X display's font path. For example, on the techexplorer installation machine you can execute

fs -config fs.config -port 8000

and on the remote X display execute

     xset fp default
     xset +fp tcp/hostname:8000
     xset fp rehash

Here is a sample fs.config file:

     client-limit = 10
     clone-self = on
     catalogue = $HOME/.mozilla/techexplorer/Fonts
     default-point-size = 120
     default-resolutions = 100,100,75,75
     use-syslog = off

When a font server (xfs) is being used you will need to add the techexplorer fonts to the server path. For RedHat Linux 7 the command is:

chkfontpath --add $HOME/.mozilla/techexplorer/Fonts

Note that this may require root access.

Web server configuration

When web browsers get a request to display a file for which they provide no native support, they look for plug-ins or "helper applications" to handle the documents. Web browsers determine the plug-in or help application by looking at the file extension for files on your local network and the MIME type for files from a web server.

When you install the techexplorer plug-in, it is auto-registered with Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer to handle Web documents with the following MIME types and corresponding file extensions:


MIME type	Corresponding File Extensions
`application/x-tex`	`.tex, .bbl`
`application/x-latex`	`.latex, .ltx`
`application/x-techexplorer`	`*.tcx`
`text/mathml`	`*.mml`

In order to use these files from a web server, you must configure the server to associate the file extension with the MIME type. In what follows we describe what you must do for several of the most popular web servers.

Netscape Server

Add the following to the mime.types file and then restart the server:

type=application/x-tex           exts=tex,bbl
type=application/x-latex         exts=latex,ltx
type=application/x-techexplorer  exts=tcx
type=text/mathml                 exts=mml

Cern HTTPD server

Add the following to the httpd.conf file and then restart the server:

AddType .tex    application/x-tex           8bit    1.0
AddType .bbl    application/x-tex           8bit    1.0
AddType .latex  application/x-latex         8bit    1.0
AddType .ltx    application/x-latex         8bit    1.0
AddType .tcx    application/x-techexplorer  8bit    1.0
AddType .mml    text/mathml                 8bit    1.0

NCSA HTTPD or Apache server

Add the following to the server configuration file (by default named srm.conf) and then restart the server:

AddType application/x-tex           .tex .bbl
AddType application/x-latex         .latex .ltx
AddType application/x-techexplorer  .tcx
AddType text/mathml                 .mml

Alternatively, add the following entries to the mime.types file:

application/x-tex           tex bbl
application/x-latex         latex ltx
application/x-techexplorer  tcx
text/mathml                 mml

Microsoft Internet Information Server 2.0

Add the following to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Inetinfo\Parameters\MimeMap section of the registry:

application/x-tex,tex,,5
application/x-tex,,bbl
application/x-latex,latex,,5
application/x-latex,,ltx
application/x-techexplorer,tcx,,5
text/mathml,mml,,5

Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0

Start the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). For Windows NT, this is usually located under: Start | Programs | Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack | Microsoft Internet Information Server | Internet Service Manager.
In the left pane, expand the Internet Information Server branch located under Console Root.
Right click on the computer name that is hosting the web service you want to modify and select Properties from the menu.
A window will pop up with the properties of the web server. Around the bottom of this pane is a section titled Computer MIME Map. Click the File Types button.
Click New Type.

Add the following (clicking OK after each addition):

For 'Associated Extension' add:  For 'Content Type (MIME)' add:
tex                              application/x-tex
bbl                              application/x-tex
latex                            application/x-latex
ltx                              application/x-latex
tcx                              application/x-techexplorer
mml                              text/mathml

More information about configuring IIS may be available at the Microsoft web site.

Integre techexplorer Hypermedia Browser is a trademark of Integre Technical Publishing.
Send comments and questions to techexplorer@integretechpub.com.
Visit the official techexplorer home page at http://www.integretechpub.com/techexplorer/.