Setting Things Up

In order to view these pages effectively and interactively, you must first configure your computer system appropriately.

The pages use the software package Geometer's Sketchpad 3.0 to display "live" geometrical sketches.

If your computer runs anything other than Macintosh OS or Windows, you will not be able to view the live sketches at all, since GSP exists only for MacOS and Windows; however, you should be able to follow and understand much of the material from the static sketches.

If you are running MacOS or Windows but don't have GSP installed on your machine, you can download a demo copy from Key Curriculum Press, its publisher, or from the Math Forum. This demo functions much as the full version does, but has some features disabled. It will let you download the sketches and modify them, but will not let you save any changes you make.

For full functionality, you will need a complete version of GSP.

There are two important settings you should make in the GSP Preferences (under the Display menu)

• the angles setting should be "directed angles"
• the Script Tools folder (look under More . . .) should be (or contain) the Toolbox

• mime type : application
• subtype : x-gsp
• suffixes : .gsp
• file type : GSPk
• Application : GSP 3.00
• action : open application

With these settings, your browser should download GSP sketches and then open them. If you want to download scripts for the Toolbox individually, repeat the process with the following settings:

• mime type : application
• subtype : x-gss
• suffixes : .gss
• file type : GSPc
• Application : GSP 3.00
• action : save to disk

With these settings, your browser should download scripts and then ask you where to save them. You should put them in the Toolbox folder.

Finally, some "esthetic" considerations: since it's not yet easily possible to combine different fonts on the same web page, all mathematical symbols in these pages are pictures (GIFs) and come in only one fixed size. The pages will look best if the size of the font you use to view them (set somewhere in your browser's Preferences) produces text that is the same size as the symbols in the following line (the symbols are 14 point Helvetica).

Points and are the edgepoints of the line through and .

The particular font is not important: use a sans-serif font (e.g. Helvetica) if you like your math and text similar, and a serif font (e.g. Times) if you like them different.