Help on viewing these Historical Maps of the World

This help file was last updated July 24, 2007.

If the map is not visible: If the SVG map is not visible you probably do not have the SVG viewer installed. A viewer can be downloaded for free from at www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/

Firefox web browser:

Mozilla has included a built-in SVG viewer in version 2 of Firefox. However this version does not include several features that are important to viewing our maps. The popup information that shows more detail for countries when you scroll over them is not available. There also is no zoom and pan interface altho a somewhat limited extension is available. We will continue to recommend the Microsoft Internet Explorer and the Adobe SVG viewer until these features are available or until we can devise a more workable solution. For more information go to http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/faq.html#does.

Adobe SVG viewer being discontinued: Adobe has announced that it will discontinue support for its SVG viewer as of Jan 1, 2009 (extended from 2008 due to popular demand). It still is the best solution for viewing our maps. It does work with Microsoft Vista and until something changes to cause it to stop working we will continue to recommend its use. None of the other viewers or browsers currently available support all of the features that our maps use (see below). We will keep looking for better solutions to this problem. If you have any suggestions please contact jcn@worldhistorymaps.com.

Popup Information: Information about the country will appear in a popup window as the mouse moves over a name.

Layers: Clicking the checkboxes will turn the layers on or off. The sequence of layers cannot be changed and the country and ocean layers are always on.

Navigating

Panning: Hold the alt key and click-and-drag with the mouse to pan an SVG image.

Zooming: Hold the control key and click to zoom in at the mouse pointer location. Hold the control key and click-and-drag to select a region to zoom into. Hold the shift key, too, to zoom out. You can also use the zoom commands in the context menu. Using the contextual pop-up menu

Context Menu: Right-click in the SVG image area to open the contextual pop-up menu. This will reveal the commands and options for interacting with the SVG image.

Links: If you bring up the context menu over a link, you can choose Open or Open in New Window to activate the link.

Quality: You can disable the Higher Quality option to cause the SVG image to display more quickly, but with lower quality.

Searching: Click Find to open the find dialog box. Here you may enter the text you want to search for, make choices about matching whole words only, case, and the direction of the search. The find command works with transparent, obscured, or moving text. The entire document is searched, regardless of how much of the SVG is currently visible. The result of the search is highlighted, and panned (but not zoomed) into view.

Copying: The Copy SVG and Save SVG as commands let you copy the SVG image to the clipboard and save the image to a local file. The copy command places the SVG as it currently appears onto the clipboard in both Unicode and raster formats. Note that this differs from the Save SVG as command, which makes a copy of the original SVG file. When text is selected, the copy command changes to Copy Selected Text.

Platform:This product was developed on an Intel Pentium IV PC running Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6.0, and Adobe SVG Viewer 3.0. The SVG viewer may not work on older systems. If you have problems running on other platforms please contact us.

Font Problems: SVG looks for the True Type font listed as closest in similarity to Arial, which is an Open Type font. Occasionally another dissimilar font will be ranked by Windows XP as the most similar True Type font to Arial. If you delete the offending font, a true Arial-style True Type font will be correctly listed as the most similar to Arial.