Configuring your Computer to View and Use Live Sketches

The pages of the booklet use the software package Geometer's Sketchpad 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. 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 (i.e. to save your work), you will need a complete version of GSP.

Once you've obtained a copy of GSP, you will have to configure your web browser to use it as a helper application. Find the menu of your browser that lets you select helper applications (usually under preferences). Select New . . and then supply as much of the following information as your browser needs.

• mime type : application
• subtype : x-gsp
• suffixes : .gsp
• file type : GSPk
• Application : GSP 3.06 (or whichever version you have) [You may need to put a   (space)"%1"    after the application path to make GSP open the file rather than a blonk file (Navigator on PC's). If this doesn't work, try leaving off the quotes.]
• action : open application

With these settings, your browser should download GSP sketches and then open them.

You can download all the scripts in the toolbox at once as a compressed file without further configuration. [Not yet implemented]. If you want to download scripts from the Toolbox page individually, repeat the process above with the following settings:

• mime type : application
• subtype : x-gss
• suffixes : .gss
• file type : GSPc
• Application : GSP 3.06 (or whichever version you have)
• action : save to disk

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

Finally, some "esthetic" considerations: 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.