Viewing Text Articles

More than 65,000 text articles are contained in Britannica CD. The great majority of articles are brief or of moderate length and are discussions of particular persons, places, institutions, things, or concepts. Longer articles are divided into separate units for easier access and more accurate searching. In longer articles, the units are linked to each other by Next Section links at the end of all units except the last, and Previous Section links at the beginning.

Approximately 700 articles are long enough to require headings and subheadings to organize their contents. These articles are also provided with Tables of Contents which may be accessed from the top of each unit, and from which any unit in the article may be directly accessed.

Some topics are the subject of two articles, one a brief summary and the other a longer, more detailed treatment. In such cases, the brief summary articles contain links to their longer counterparts. Certain articles on very broad topics (such as music or mathematics) serve as signposts, pointing to the principal articles that treat that topic.

Article Pages

Text articles are accessed when you click on a title in the Hitlist, in an Index entry, or in one of the Propædia sections, or a reference in the Index. When you access the article, the title and subtitles will appear in the Title Bar and near the top of the content area. The top line contains links to the Home Page and to Help, as well as a Query Box and a Search References pull-down menu. Other search options, such as changing the number of articles displayed in the Hitlist, are available only from the Home Page.

Article Features

Articles in Britannica CD contain hundreds of thousands of hypertext links, providing you with "one-click" access to a variety of supporting material.

Figures, Tables, and Other Illustrations

In the articles, references to illustrations and figures have been identified as hypertext links, and clicking on the link will open an image. Some of the maps, drawings, photographs, graphs, and charts that illustrate the text articles have accompanying captions. In this case, clicking on the link will take you first to a caption document.

Cross-References

Text cross-references have been identified to inform you of other Britannica CD articles containing material closely related to the subject under discussion. Cross-references are indicated by see, see also, compare, q.v., and qq.v. (quod vide and quae vide, Latin for "which see"). The article name or section appears as a hypertext link. Clicking on the link will take you directly to related information, without the need to return to the Hitlist or to the Index.

For example, the article "digital computer" contains a brief discussion of supercomputers and a cross-reference pointing to that article, which you can access by clicking on the cross-reference link.

Index Links

A link to the Britannica CD Index, consisting of the word Index in brackets and in blue, appears in the text wherever a word, phrase, or concept under discussion has been indexed. Following the link to the Index entry for that word, phrase, or concept will bring to the screen a structured set of references to other text articles where the subject is also discussed. A check box (Show Index Links) at the end of each article allows you to activate these [INDEX] references. Doing this enables you to hyperlink to the Index.

As an example, in the article "New York City," turn on Index links at the bottom of the article and click on the first [INDEX] link. This link will take you to a list of other places in the database where New York City is discussed, including descriptions of its arts, economics, finance, government, and many more fascinating subjects.

Propædia Links

A hyperlink called Related Propædia Topics is found at the ends of many articles. The link leads to the point in the encyclopaedia's Outline of Knowledge where the article has been classified. From that point you may use the hotlinked list of related articles to move directly to discussions of closely related topics, or you may navigate up or down the many levels of the outline to topics of greater generality or specificity. Lists of related articles may occur at any level of the Outline.

For example, from the Propædia links found in the article "rose" you could study its role in perfume-making, horticulture, or plant breeding. You can also link to its place in the taxonomy of flowering plants, where you will find a list of other related species.