WWW Graphic History Browser Help

About the WWW Graphic History Browser

Navigation

The Graphic History View displays the documents that have been visited by the Document View window. There is a separate Graphic History Window for each Document View that is created.

Documents are represented as nodes in the tree, and hypertext links are represented as lines and arrows. As the pointer is moved over a node, its full Title and URL are displayed at the bottom of the history window. To re-visit a document, you can double click on a node in the tree and the Document View will open its associated URL.

If a document has more than one incoming link, a special vertical arrow pointing up appears to the left of the node. By moving the mouse pointer over the arrow head, the nodes that have incoming links to this node will be highlighted in grey. If a document has an outgoing link to a node already present in the tree, a special vertical arrow pointing down appears to the left of the tree. Again, by moving the mouse pointer over the arrow head the destination of this link will be highlighted in grey.

To get an overall view of the structure of the tree, use the 'zoom out' option. To collapse a small portion of the tree, click with the left button on an arrow pointing to a node. You'll see the nodes in that subtree collapse to a smaller representation.

File Menu

Open and Save: If you wish, you can save the structure of a tree to a file. The format of the file is a simple ascii format, one node entry per line. Thumbnail information is not saved. By default, graphic history filenames have the extension '.tree'.
Clear Window: Clears all but the current document being viewed from the tree.
Close Window: Pops down the graphic history browser.

Options

Auto Resize: The program will automatically try to shrink the tree to fit inside the window.
Display URL: The urls of the documents are displayed in each node. Urls are printed on three lines and truncated if the exceed the length of the title.
Display Title: The title of the documents are displayed in each node. Note that the title may be abbreviated depending on the setting of 'AutoResize' and the 'Name Length' slider in the Preferences... Dialog Box.
Display Thumbnail: A smaller version of the image seen in the Document View is placed on the tree.
Pretty Style: The pretty algorithm attempts to pack the tree as tightly as possible. With pretty style turned off, only the title and url are displayed, with no thumbnails and no attempt to abbreviate the title of the documents.
Zoom Out: collapse the view to a smaller representation
Zoom In: expand the view to the normal size representation
Preferences...: Presents a dialog where you can set all of the above options, plus set a slider to indicate the level of truncation for titles.

X Resources

These resources are defined in addition to Mosaic's resources. They all control settings the the Graphic History view and share the same 'hist' prefix.

Name                    Type            Default
====                    ====            =======
histNodeColor           Pixel           Black
histArrowColor          Pixel           Black
histLineColor           Pixel           Black
histNodeWidth           Int             75
histNodeHeight          Int             75
histMaxNodeWidth        Int             10000
histDisplayTitle        Boolean         True
histDisplayUrls         Boolean         False
histDisplayThumbnails   Boolean         False
histNodeFont            Font            "-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-10"
histHelpUrl             String          "http://www.cc.gatech.edu/grads/a/Eric.Ayers/MosaicG/MosaicG_1.0_help.html"
histAboutUrl             String         "http://www.cc.gatech.edu/grads/a/Eric.Ayers/MosaicG/MosaicG_1.0_about.html" 
histThumbnailX          Int             64
histThumbnailY          Int             64
histThumbnailScale      Int             2

histNodeColor: Specifies the color of the tree nodes.
histArrowColor: Specifies the color of the arrows that represent links in the tree.
histLineColor: Specifies the color of the lines that represent links in the tree.
histNodeWidth: Specifies the default width of a node in the tree if the pretty drawing algorithm is disabled.
histNodeHeight: Specifies the default height of a node in the tree if the pretty drawing algorithm is disabled.
histMaxNodeWidth: Specifies the maximum allowable width of a tree node.
histDisplayTitle: Specifies whether the tree should display titles for each node by default.
histDisplayUrls: Specifies whether the tree should display titles for each node by default.
histDisplayThumbnails: Specifies whether the tree should display thumbnail images for each node by default.
histNodeFont: Specifies the font to use to draw node information in the tree.
histHelpUrl: Specifies the URL to lookup when the help menu item is invoked from the Graphic History View.
histAboutUrl: Specifies the URL to lookup when the about menu item is invoked from the Graphic History View.
histThumbnailX: Specifies the width of a thumbnail image.
histThumbnailY: Specifies the height of a thumbnail image.
histThumbnailScale: Specifies the scale by which a thumbnail should be reduced.

Special thanks to Dr. John Stasko for advising me on this project.

Eric Ayers

zundel@cc.gatech.edu

Graphics Visualization, and Usability Center
Georgia Tech