Online Application Guide

The three tabs at the bottom control whether you are in Choose, View, or Print mode.

When you first open the application you are show the “Choose” document screen with six tabs along the top and three at the bottom.  The six tabs at the top allow you to choose from among the documents available.

Choose from the list of documents by double clicking on the document line or by single clicking and choosing “View”.   Note: Be sure to read all of the “Course of Study” documents before attempting to use this Curriculum.   Insert CD Disk 1 into your CD ROM Drive. 

CD Drive for setting the CD Drive (it should work automatically but you can set it manually here as well.)  Pressing the  button will check for which CD is in the computer and show its label. 

About gives you Version and Copyright information.

Print List lets you preview then print out any of the lists of materials you are viewing. Choose the print button (see below) in the previewer to print the list.

Exit will exit from the program.

The Advanced button  can be turned on and off  to reveal advanced controls.

Log shows you a Print Log of all previous print jobs.  Clicking on any document will also show you the last date and pages you printed from that document in red on the Status Line at the bottom.

Extensive help is built into the program and made available through the “status line” at the bottom of the screen. Also available are the “About” box for version information and “Instructions” buttons on the vocabulary screens.

Viewing Documents and Books

On the left of the screen is a scrollable list of all available pages in the selected document.  The size of the elevator slide control is proportional to the size of the page list.  The content area shows the page itself.  

View panel gives choices for different viewing situations.

Clicking on the image allows you to move it around as well as to zoom in and out with the left and right mouse buttons as well as with the mouse scroll wheel.

Finder lets you type in a page number (or index word for the Encyclopaedia or Dictionary) and then press Enter to immediately goto that page.

Page Views allow for Full Page, Full Width, Two Column, or Three Column views.  The latter two are for use with books that are printed in 2 or 3 columns.

Doc Nav is a simple way to navigate to the prior and next pages in a document. 

Alt-1 – Prior Page

Alt-2 – Next Page

Page Navigation allows for navigation within the page itself.  You can move to the upper left or right of a page when in Two or Three column view or rotate the page when in Full Page or Full Width views.

Alt-3 – Go to Upper Left or Rotate Left

Alt-4 – Move down the page

Alt-5 – Go to Upper Right or Rotate Right

Alt-6 – Move up the page or Rotate Straight

Quality… is an advanced control that allows changes to the way the image is displayed.  The default is Mitchell for best quality.

Maximize

If you have a desire to see as much of a page as possible, click the Maximize button at the bottom right of the screen.  Press it again (Normal) to bring it back to normal.  The Maximize button increases content space while still allowing access to essential navigation aids.  You can also click the full screen button at the top right side of the window to make it fill the whole screen.  Reclick to return to normal view and navigation aids.

First you should print and read the Course of Study documents.  They will explain the unique aspects of a Self-Teaching home-school and how to organize it.  If you do not read the Course of Study, you may lose much of the value of the Robinson Self-Teaching Home-School Curriculum.

When you have chosen a document and are ready to print it, click on the Print tab. 

Select – Pressing the select button gives you a convenient way to select the pages you wish to print.

Even Pgs, or Odd Pgs  – Use this option for two sided printing.  You can print on one side at a time with an ordinary printer and on both sides with a duplex printer.  You would first print the odd pages then the even pages on the other side of the sheets.  On an ordinary printer this type of printing is suseptible to errors from page misfeeds.  A simpler type of two sided printing is to print half the book on one side of the paper and feed it through again to print the other half of the book on the other side of the paper.  When the book is read it is read on the right side only.  When you come to the last page you flip the binder around and page through, again reading only the right side.

Print brings up the Windows Printer Dialog where you can make printer choices unique to your printer as well as set the pages to be printed.  The default is to print the current page. If the printer designated at the top of the dialog box is not the printer you want to use, click on Setupand change it.

Note:  Because you are printing very high resolution digital images of original pages, the printing process may be slower than for other programs you use, especially if you have an older printer.  This is normal.  For tips on optimizing your printing speed and overcoming printer related problems, see the next section on Possible Problems and Their Remedies.

Print % allows you to print at any size larger or smaller than the original.  This is especially useful for smaller sized books.  For instance, the Rover Boys books print well at 150%.  The books are preset to print at 6.5″ X 9″ on letter sized paper.

Fit to Page is the other choice here.  It works with the Margins button to simply fit every page within the bounds of the margins you set.

R Check this box to print out pages in Reverse order.  This is useful if your printer does not order the sheets correctly.

Skip D Check this box to skip grayscale photographs and dark picture pages marked with a “D” (to save time and ink).  See the Set Mode option on the View tab for more about this feature.

Dark sets that page as a “Dark Picture Page” indicated by a “D” following the page number.  These pages can then be skipped when printing (see Skip D button) to save on ink and toner.

Batch lets you set the number of pages that will be sent to the printer in a batch.  This keeps the printer subsystem fro mbeing overwhelmed with too large an amount of data to deal with at one time.  20 is a good default for this setting.

Printing with a Pentium computer and an HP 4 Plus printer proceeds at a full 12 pages per minute. With the very slowest computers and printers, this rate can be reduced to as little as 6 pages per hour. Just let your computer print at whatever speeds its capabilities allow.

We used to purchase paper already punched for 3-hole notebook and 3-hole binders at our local Price-Costco or Sams discount store. The 3-hole paper costs about $30-$35 per 5,000 sheets and the 3-hole binders cost about $1 each in bulk. Now we buy the regular paper and the older children 3 hole punch it with a heavy duty (fixed hole – not sliding) punch. It does about 25-40 pages at a time.

Since you will want to print many pages, it would be advisable to have a new model, good-quality, low-operating-cost laser printer. See the Printer Recommendations for more suggestions on printers.

To make the Robinson Curriculum and Henty Collection more convenient to use you can now copy the CDs to your hard drive. Copying all the CDs to your C: drive requires about 14-17 GB of free space. If you like, just copy the ones you use most often.

To use the Robinson CD Copier simply put a RC or Henty CD into your CD drive and it will start copying it to your hard drive. After it has finished copying, take out the CD and insert the next one.

The program will keep track of which CDs have been copied for you. Click the More Options button to see the list of previously copied CDs. Once they are all copied you can keep your CDs in the case and store it in a safe place.

Once copied the Robinson Curriculum program will automatically find the content on your computer without you having to insert a CD.

Click here to download: 

RobinsonCDCopierSetup.msi

After installing look for the program in the Robinson Curriculum folder. Set it to run in Administrator mode. Right click on program icon then Properties, then Compatibility tab then check box for Run as Administrator and click OK.

Please report any problems to: [email protected]

Difficulty in reading the CDs

If this happens while using the CDs and it affects some books and not others…  The disks of the Curriculum are full.  Therefore they exercise the CD Drive to its fullest extent.  Some low quality CD Drives have difficulty reading the outer tracks of full CD ROMs.  The directories are on the outside tracks and may be unreadable by these drives.  Solution: try a different CD Drive.

Cannot See All Curriculum Control Buttons

This occurs on large graphic screens and screens with a Large Fonts setting.  It may be corrected by either reducing the size of the font or using the double arrows to pull down the bottom margin thereby increasing the screen size.

Program gives Error Messages on Some Pages, especially Grayscale and Color.

This may be fixed by updating your video driver.  If an update is not available, it usually may be fixed by using a Quality Mode less than 10.

Note: PostScript Printer drivers may fail to print properly or may be extremely slow.

Additional Suggestions

Be sure you have enough free space on your C Drive

Make sure you install on a drive with at least 6 to 8 MB available disk space.

Narrowing down the problem

You can try to install the program on another computer.  If it works fine there then chances are there is no problem with the CDs but a misconfiguration or faulty hardware on the original computer.

Use another printer driver

Is there another driver that can be used to print to this printer, or is there another emulation that can be used? If so, try these options and see if the printer driver is the problem. Check the version of the driver through Control Panel and ensure you have the latest version.

General Advice

Some printers and print drivers are more prone to problems than other as manufacturers try to gain a competitive advantage by pushing the technology envelope.

As a rule, the print drivers that ship on the Microsoft Windows CD are more reliable than those that come with the printer. Thus, if you are having problems, look in you printer manual for information on which other printers your printer is compatible with. Then install the print driver(s) for those printers (My Computer – Printers – Add Printer). Print drivers for earlier models may be simpler, more thoroughly tested, and thus more reliable.

For many printers that are PCL (HP’s Printer Control Language) compatible, the HP LaserJet Series II print driver is a solid choice for a fast, reliable print driver.

Reboot

A simple reboot (stopping and starting) is also an effective way to get around many computer problems.

Does the printer driver memory setting match the printer’s capability?

If the printer driver memory setting is set higher than the amount of memory actually available on the printer, you could encounter various printing problems such as dropped text, missing graphics, etc. Be sure that you set the memory for exactly the amount available on your printer. If you are unsure of the amount of memory on your printer, set the printer driver memory setting to the default.

Reinstall the Robinson Curriculum

You may reinstall the Curriculum application any time you wish.