Help on viewing these Historical Maps of the World

This help file was last updated May 7, 2011.

Recommended Web Browser: We are now recommending the Opera web browser for the best viewing of our maps. Opera has built in support for SVG and correctly displays the popup information. The latest version we have tested with is 11. Opera is available for free download at http://www.opera.com/download/.

There is an Opera extension which does a much better job of zooming and panning.  It works with Opera 11 and zooms in and out by using the mouse wheel.  It is available for free at https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/svg-zoomnpan/1.1/?display=en

Firefox web browser: The Mozilla Firefox also has a built-in SVG and as of May 2011 (version 4.0) Firefox now correctly displays the popup information. For more information go to http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/faq.html#does.
There is no build it zoom and pan interface however and we have not yet found an add on.

Google Chrome web browser: The Google Chrome browser (version 11) will display the maps and does show the popup information. However it does not correctly display the ocean overlays as they are currently constructed. There also is no zoom and pan interface..

Microsoft Internet Explorer: IE does not have built in SVG support and will require a viewer plugin. The Adobe SVG viewer still works but support has been discontinued.

Adobe SVG viewer discontinued: Adobe has discontinued support for its SVG viewer as of Jan 1, 2009. It still works for the time being and was the best solution for viewing our maps, however because the operating system environment keeps changing, using it could expose you to security or other problems. For more information go to http://www.adobe.com/svg/eol.htm.

Popup Information: Information about the country that will appear in a popup window as the mouse hovers over a name. There may be a slight delay in appearing.

General Information:
These maps are designed to work as follows. For the maps on the CD, once you insert the CD the file index.htm should open in your default web browser. This will display a list of years and clicking on any one of them will bring up the htm file for that year which will display the map from the corresponding svg file. If you copy all the files on to your hard drive the same procedure should work if you start from the index.htm file. If your default web browser is Opera there should not be any problem. If your default web browser is something else there may be limitations in functionality or display problems. If the index does not open automatically you will then need to open the index.htm file in your browser. You can do this by using the file menu, or by dragging the file into an open browser window, or by right clicking on the htm file and selecting open with and chose Opera. You can open any of the files directly by the same means.

For each year there is an htm file and a corresponding svg file. The svg file opens within the htm file but you should be able to open the svg file by itself. The only reason that you would not be able to open the svg file directly would be that you have some other program defined as the default program to open svg files.

Once you have displayed the map you can right click anywhere within the map boundaries and use the context menu to copy the svg image. Once you copy the svg image you can paste this into a picture editing program.

SVG is a standard of the World Wide Web Consortium but each browser has defined its implementation differently.

Note: These maps require significant system resources and may not work properly on older computers. Performance will also be slower when viewing the samples on the web. For fastest performance we suggest copying the contents of the CD to your hard drive. The maps display in layers and a slight delay may be experienced while layers are being drawn.