Technical Requirements

The British Colonist site has been designed to be functional across a wide range of browsers and operating systems. However, for optimal performance the following configurations are recommended:

Browsers:

• Firefox 2 or greater
• Internet Explorer 6 or greater

PDF Viewer:

• Adobe Acrobat 7 or greater, configured as a plugin

Other readers will likely work, but certain features, notably search term highlighting, may be missing. If Acrobat is not configured as a plugin, pages will open outside the search window and may obscure the page-level navigation links within each issue.

Monitor:

Due to the size of the original documents, this site has been designed to work with a monitor resolution of 1280x800 or greater. Lower resolutions will require more scrolling.

Known Issues

The searchable text for the British Colonist was generated by optical character recognition (OCR) software reading images created from old microfilm. Quality of the output varies greatly due to the very small size of the text, variety of typefaces used, and the condition of the original images.

Consequently, it was not possible to index all instances of every term in the paper, and not all terms in the index are accurate. Search term highlighting may occasionally fail when there is a mismatch between the cleaned-up OCR text and the text in the original PDF document. These limitations are inherent in the technologies used in this project and the nature of the original source materials. Future developments in OCR technologies may enable us to improve the searchability of the British Colonist in time.