Versions of MIJ-NSR for Printing

One advantage to not having a static existence is that MIJ-NSR can improve with rapidly changing technology. Thanks to the Unicode Standard, modern (Version 5) web browsers can handle special characters pretty well. Because MIJ-NSR was designed to support Unicode, your browser should be able to display greek letters, etc. Some users may still use older browsers, and may experience some difficulties. We still produce a "compatibility version" of every paper for those users.

Different Versions for Special Characters

If you don't want to think about it, just use the "Standard Version".

One limit to HTML of not too long ago was limited handling of special characters. Although many accented characters are handled well, (Å, Ü, é for example) , most greek letters are not. Thus, when the greek letter alpha appears on a web page, we generally have to put in a graphic, like this:. Netscape versions 2 and higher and Internet Explorer versions 3 and higher allowed an ugly way to put greek letters on a page, using the FONT tag. Thus, if you have the right Symbol font installed, these web browsers will show this: a -as an alpha.
We've used this trick to make a special version of each article in MIJ-NSR, denoted on older article home pages as the "Symbol Font Version". Unfortunately the character mappings can be platform and font dependent. We have two versions, one for Mac's, and one for Windows.

You may need to choose the right encoding manually. In Netscape, use the "Encoding" submenu of the "View" menu. Choose the appropriate "Western" encoding. In MSIE, choose the "Character Set" submenu of the "View" menu.

Browsers later than Netscape 4.0 and MSIE 4.0 (Mac) MSIE 4.5 (Win) implement Unicode. As of 2001, Unicode is our standard method of representing greek letters . We're presenting a compatibilty version of each article as an option.

Portable Document Format

All papers since volume 3 are presented in Portable Document Format (PDF) version for printing. To use the PDF version, you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. You can obtain Adobe Acrobat Reader from the Acrobat web site.

The PDF version of a MIJ-NSR article is produced from the same XML source file as the web version, except that the figures print much better. Browser table