This is an example for a hidden note.
Click to pin it up; then click again to withdraw.

Each documentation page is divided into three main areas: the title header, the navigation pane at the left, and the main content area where you are just reading these lines.

The header displays the title of the current page, as well as a little polymake logo; whenever you click on the latter, you will return to the cover page.

The navigation pane is a terse site map: almost every documentation page can be reached with one click from there. For longer pages, the links to subchapter headings are also included. In order to preserve the clarity, the links are hierarchically grouped in topics. The most topic group lines are associated with content pages as all the leaf lines do; there are, however, few group lines linked to nothing due to the lack of our fantasy. They are not optically emphasized in any manner; if you click on such a line, just nothing happens: it's not a bug!

Initially all topics are displayed collapsed, that is, the subtopics are hidden. To unveil them, just click on the small blue triangle left to the topic text. The triangle turns with its obtuse angle down, and you will see the next hierarchy level. If you click the triangle again, the subtopics get hidden away.

Each topic keeps its collapsed/expanded state independently from others, so if you expand many topics, the navigation list become too long to fit on the screen. In this case scrolling arrows appears below the navigation list. When you move the mouse pointer over the arrow, the navigation list glides up or down slowly. Clicking on the arrow stops the gliding and scrolls the navigation list about a full window height.

At the bottom of the navigation pane there are few fixed links; one of them has leaded you to this page. The rest of them are shortcuts leading directly to the most often visited reference pages (object properties, construction clients), as well as a link to the keyword index. The latter is an alphabetically sorted list of links to all property, client, class, method, variable, and option names mentioned anywhere in the documentation. Links in the left index column lead directly to the topic description, while those in the right column expand and highlight the corresponding line in the navigation pane.

In some content pages, mainly those describing the Template Library, you can encounter green links like this. Behind them short additional notes are hidden, which had overloaded the page if were inserted in the main text. They become visible when you move the mouse pointer over the green text, and disappear as soon as pointer leaves this region. You can "pin up" the note by clicking on the green text. Some green links, however, are simultaneously real hyperlinks to another pages; please inform yourself at the status line of the browser.

### Browser magic

The polymake documentation make heavy use of JavaScript (ECMAscript), DHTML, and CSS. If these abbreviations do not tell much to you, don't care; but what is important to know is that no one browser in the world complies to the noble standards to 100%; however, there are more and less malicious species.

We have developed the pages primarily for the Mozilla browser family (including Netscape >= 6 and Firefox.) Opera (version >= 7) and Safari do their job well too. Microsoft Internet Explorer (version >= 5) is acceptable, but it does not render some fine layout details properly due to incomplete implementation of the CSS2 standard. Use other browsers at your own risk. In particular, Konqueror or the (in the meanwhile obsolete) IE for Macintosh are notorious for numerous bugs in their JavaScript engines. Therefore the documentation pages loaded there will not have expandable navigation pane nor other dynamic gimmicks. Trying ancient browsers such as Mosaic, Netscape <=4, or Internet Explorer <=4 is rather pointless.