How To Use This Manual

Reading the Manual

This Instructors' Guide is designed to be read online in any browser. To start:

  1. For Windows-based browsers:

  2. alternatively, use the My Computer function to find the CD/ROM drive and click on Basic_Instructors_Guide_r02.htm to start


  3. for Linux-based browsers:

In either case, you should see the short copyright notice and after about 5 seconds the Table of Contents.

If your browser fails to load the data, check your settings as described below.

You can click on any lesson to display the lesson plan and links to the various materials included with that lesson.

There are also Internet links on the CD first page to the RAC web site and to the errata pages for the RAC Study Guide for the Basic Qualification. If you have a live Internet connection, just click on these links and your browser will bring them up immediately.

Configuring Your Browser

This CD/ROM is designed to run under any standard browser, and we have tested Microsoft Internet Explorer under various versions of Windows and releases of Explorer. We have also tested Netscape under Windows. For Linux users we have tested Netscape 4.7, Konquerer and Opera. No significant flaws were found, although the presentation does vary between browsers. Unfortunately, due to lack of a MAC, we have not tested there. If you are a MAC user we would appreciate your comments.

The most likely problem you will find is an incorrect screen resolution to display the diagrams. Since LCD screens (flat screen panels, overhead projectors, and laptops) usually have a standard display resolution of 1024 by 968 which is hard wired, we chose to use that resolution for this manual. If you are using a CRT and a different resolution the diagrams may not fit on the screen. Testing shows that they do print correctly, however, when making overhead slides on a laser printer.

Some browsers allow you to turn off style sheets. This CD/ROM uses style sheets and they must be enabled; if not, then the text will appear but sizes, text positioning, and fonts will be wrong. Internet Explorer 4.x and up or Netscape Navigator 4.02 and up support style sheets correctly.

Netscape Navigator 4.x has some known problems when printing a screen formatted using a style sheet; usually the printing is OK but fonts and positioning are odd.

Internet Explorer has some unusual ideas about how to present some pages. The coding used here is a subset of the IETF HTML 4.0 standard and we believe that we do not have any material on the CD/ROM that IE cannot display; if you encounter any, try Netscape Navigator instead, which tends to be more congruent to the standard.

Good Luck with the course!