Zed is distributed as a single installation program (.exe) that uses an InstallShield install wizard to control the installation process. The install wizard consists of a series of dialog boxes that allow you to choose the editor features you wish to install, and where you would like to put the program files for the editor on your filesystem. The install wizard is designed to work with the Microsoft Windows Installer that comes as part of many recent versions of Windows, and that can also be installed as an option on other older versions of Windows. The install wizard ensures that an appropriate version of the Windows Installer is installed on the target machine before installing the editor.

The first dialog displays the splash screen for the editor including version and copyright information identifying the product being installed, followed by a standard welcome dialog describing what the install wizard is about to do. A third dialog displays the license agreement for the editor, followed by a fourth dialog that gives you the opportunity to enter your name and organization information.

Zed accepts input files in MathML format (.mml) as well as input files in its own internal Zed format (.zed). Either or both of these file types can be associated with the editor so that Zed will be used as the default application for editing files of these types.

Next, you are given the option to select a "Complete" install, where the install wizard installs all program features and chooses reasonable defaults for program folders and such, or to select a "Custom" install that allows you to choose which program features to install, and allows you to set the destination folder for the Zed program files. After making these selections, an additional dialog gives you one last opportunity to go back and change your decisions before installing.

The program features you may elect to install or not to install include the Zed component edition, the Zed application edition, the documentation (including the Users Guide you are now reading) and a collection of example files demonstrating how the editor works.

When it comes time to upgrade the version of Zed you are using, be sure to uninstall the previous version before installing the new one.

There are several means that can be used to remove Zed from your machine. The install wizard that you used to install the editor can also be used to modify, repair, or remove an installation by re-executing the installation program. Also, the install wizard adds an entry to the list of installed programs, so Zed can be removed by using the features of the Add/Remove Programs dialog box accessible from the Windows Control Panel. Finally, the install wizard adds a Start Menu item labeled Zed Uninstall that is a shortcut to remove the editor from the system.

Each of these three alternatives asks you for confirmation before removing all of the program files, shortcuts, and registry entries associated with the editor.

Of course, we hope after you uninstall the version of Zed currently on your machine, you will want to be sure and install the latest version.

If you are reading these words, you must have found at least one way of opening the Users Guide for the editor. The Users Guide is distributed as a collection of HTML files and MathML examples, plus a few style sheets, script files, and images. The install wizard adds a Start Menu entry labeled Zed Users Guide that you can use to open the documentation.

This shortcut opens the web browser on the main index file (Doc/Users/Index.html) for the documentation, and presents the documentation using a frame on the left for navigating among the sections, and a frame on the right for reading the text of the documentation. To view the documentation without using frames, open the web browser on the cover page (Doc/Users/Cover.html) for the documentation instead; the downward navigation links are still available by clicking on the titles of the desired sections and subsections, and one can navigate back to the cover page by clicking on the large Zed icon at the top of any page. At the bottom of the cover page for the documentation there are also links for switching back and forth between the frames and noframes versions of the users guide. The documentation files can all be found under the Doc/Users directory wherever the program files for Zed were installed.

The documentation may also be opened from within the editor by using the menu item on the Help menu, found on both the frame menu in the application edition, and on the context menu in both the application edition and the component edition. The Help menu also contains a menu item that displays the correct version of the editor that has been installed on your machine.

Many of the sections of the Users Guide contain subsections (and in some cases, further subsections) that provide their own navigation links by clicking on appropriate section titles. Most sections have a brief abstract at the top of the section giving a thumbnail sketch of the information contained in that section.

In addition to the navigation links provided for moving from section to section, many important terms used in the documentation are described in the Glossary, and instances of those terms are called out in the text with their own links to their definition in the Glossary. Furthermore, these same terms, plus many more, are collected in the Index which contains links from important terms to significant places in the documentation where they appear.

The standalone application edition of the editor can be opened using the Zed Application Start Menu entry added by the install wizard. This menu item simply runs the executable program for the application edition of the editor, which can be found in Bin/Zed.exe. The application edition of the editor provides a standard Windows multiple document interface for creating MathML files. By default, an empty frame window is created, allowing you to open MathML files from the filesystem, or to create your own.

For MathML files, the canonical "Hello, World" file is the quadratic equation, provided in the distribution as the file Example/quadratic.mml. You can use the File→Open menu item to bring up the standard file open dialog box, then navigate to the appropriate directory to open the file. Upon doing so, you should see the quadratic equation in its own child window. Many more such examples can be found in the directory Doc/Users/Example; these examples are all linked directly from this Users Guide in the MathML Element Reference and can be viewed within the web browser (while you are reading the documentation) as described there.

The component edition of the editor is used to view web pages containing MathML expressions using the web browser. Since the component edition of the editor is an ActiveX control, it is subject to the constraint that it is designed for use inside Internet Explorer, or inside any other program that can act as an ActiveX container, such as PowerPoint or Word. The component edition of the editor is installed in Bin/Zed.ocx, and provides access to many of the same menu items present in the application edition using the right mouse button context menu.

To view the quadratic equation in the web browser, start your web browser and load the page Example/hello.html. This page initially shows an empty instance of the component. To open a file, click the right mouse button and select the File→Open menu item to bring up the standard file open dialog box, and navigate to the appropriate directory to find the file to be opened. Upon selecting the file Example/quadratic.mml, you should once again see the quadratic equation, this time as an embedded instance of MathML in your web browser.