VIEWING TIPS
               Updated 5/16/04


Browsers, Screen Size and Colors

The pages on this web site were designed for viewing using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and have been tested using Netscape Communicator 6.0 . We cannot recommend Netscape's latest version 6.0 at this time. We are currently testing all pages, using Netscape 6.0. 

For best viewing choose 800 x 600 monitor resolution with 16M colors. If you are viewing in 640 x 480, and 800 x 600 screen resolution you will encounter pages that require right/left scrolling, and the pages and fonts could appear too large, depending upon your browser and monitor. A 16 or 256 color setting will not display images or backgrounds as intended.

Most JPG and GIF images have been compressed so that their respective pages won't take a long time to load. Many JPGs have been saved using progressive compression that enables decompression in stages for faster initial viewing of an image. I do sometimes use animated GIFS and embedded background sound files sparingly--usually for special events, holidays or for kid's pages, if any. If they are annoying, use the STOP or STOP PLAY button to prevent them from doing their thing.

All links are encoded to appear in a different color or gradation from the base font. The pages will look best if you set your browser's links option to "not underlined". This is true with other sites as well.

Fonts and Alignment

All fonts used in our HTML are generally basic MS Windows 95/ MSIE web fonts, usually with a MAC font as second choice. For instance, this page is written in Arial and Helvetica. For more advanced fonts, usually for section titles, a GIF or JPG graphic is used with a transparent background. Some pages may not look as intended, depending upon your font files, browser, and operating system. For all of you font fans, here's an interesting link at Microsoft where you can get many of the free fonts used on our web pages. If you run Win 95/98/NT and use MSIE 4.0, you already have most of them. Go to MS Typography and surf around a bit.

Here are some of the fonts we use or have available for use on this website. You should try to download the fonts that you don't have so that you can experience the site the way it was designed and built. Simply follow the MS Typography link above and search around then download the fonts you don't have. 

To determine what you have and what you don't, simply open any word processor program and click on the list of fonts available to your computer. 

SERIF FONTS

Times New Roman      Times      Garamond      Palatino
Century Schoolbook      Courier New      Georgia      Courier


SANS SERIF FONTS

Arial      Helvetica (MAC)      Tahoma      Trebuchet MS      Geneva
Verdana      MS Sans Serif      Impact     


OTHER FONTS

Comic Sans MS      Technical      Script      This is your browser's default font.
MS Wingdings
1234567890 QWERTYUIOP ASDFGHJKL ZXCVBNM
MS Symbol
1234567890 QWERTYUIOP ASDFGHJKL ZXCVBNM

Many pages on our site have justified text alignment which makes the text span all the way across the page to the right margin as you would see in a book or newspaper. This paragraph is justified; none of the others on this page are justified. Overall, this works well but it can lead to some wide open spaces, since you have to guess about hyphenation, if used at all. My apologies to those of you who see open spaces. We also use MS Frontpage to do some of the many scenes we build.

 

Frames and Tables

Frames are use very sparingly, if at all, on this site. Tables, however, are used almost everywhere -- this page is a table. It should look basically the same on any size monitor at any screen resolution size, full screen or resized. The only variation should be the amount of blank space to each side. Netscape and MSIE and their various versions display tables somewhat differently but do maintain most of the web designer's intent. Printing output seems better with tables than without and that's another reason why we use them.

Browser Plug-Ins, Helpers and Applications Software

In the site's pages, forms are available or soon will be, for downloading in Adobe's Portable Document (PDF) Format. The Adobe Acrobat Reader is free and can be downloaded from Adobe at   www.adobe.com and must be installed as a plug-in/helper application in order for you to see and print the forms. You can, however, download and save a form without having the reader, and then download the Acrobat Reader at a later time.

Most of these downloadable documents in the site are archived (compressed) in the ZIP format and you must unzip them using software such as WinZip or FreeZip or PKZIP. Some may be self-extracting files, with an .EXE extension. See the Read Me files for details as to the type of compression and what is required to read the unzipped files, since many of them are databases or spreadsheets.

Movies, Video, Streaming Media


Some news pages contains pictures of events and text, along with a narration of the text in the .WAV or MP3 format. Your browser is no doubt already configured to play these sound files, if you have a sound card. Many are also encoded in the Realplayer or Quicktime or  Windows Media Players format. The company provides free end user browser plug-ins, and players. We are also evaluating other various streaming audio/video technologies that will be compatible with our server and the largest number of browsers, PC types and operating systems, i.e., Netscape, MSIE; PC, Mac; Windows 3x/9x/NTx, OS/2, Unix, Linux, etc. We want the plug-in to be free to users and to enable us to stream on-demand audio and video selections from our growing Mardi Gras Archives collections and from our coming multimedia presentation and film collections at our disposal. So please stay tuned.

Thanks for visiting our site. Please send your questions, comments or suggestions to me at webmaster@mardigrasdigest.com

                                                              

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