The webpages inside the CMS (content management system) are all using the UTF-8 character encoding, but other webpages can now change the charset with the appropriate use of the meta tag.  This was the behaviour on the old website and it has been restored to make this simpler for users.

The activity2010-faculty.tex file on coxeter has been slightly updated.  The second line was uncommented and third line was commented out.  This should give a better papersize and orientation automatically for users.  (You can make this change yourself if you have already copied the file from /usr/local/lib and started editing it.)

When trying to print (from within acroread) a pdf file which was generated with:

pdflatex activity2010-faculty.tex

you should not select “Landscape” under “Orientation” since the file will already be in landscape mode and selecting this option will result in bad output.

The new departmental webpages that use nicer mathematical fonts (such as many Events pages) use jsMath (code that translates TeX-like instructions into javascript to display in your browser) in order to create the characters in mathematical fonts.  If you install the extra jsMath fonts (click on the “jsMath” button in the lower right corner of a browser window that uses such fonts and select “Hi-Res Fonts for Printing”) then things will look and print much better.

If you do not wish to install the fonts it would still probably be a good idea to click on the “jsMath” in the lower corner then select “Options” and then select “Use native Unicode characters”.  Special mathematical characters may not be available, but characters such as Greek letters will look much better than with the default “Use images for symbols only” setting (images are difficult to properly position and are often shifted up or down on the line and do not look very good) .

Of course this only works if you have javascript enabled in your browser.

If you click on the About link on the main departmental webpage, http://www.math.toronto.edu/, you will see Computing on the left-hand side menu.  That link will bring you to http://www.math.toronto.edu/cms/computing/, which is the main help page.  There is also a wiki page at http://wiki.math.toronto.edu/TorontoMathWiki/index.php/Computing.  In general if you are looking for help you should try the Search link (accessible on the top right of our main page) .  If you have trouble finding information through there then please let us know and we will try to improve the search function.

Recently (this week) there have been many spam emails sent to departmental addresses.  There is an attached file (called “settings.zip”) that you are asked to run.  Running attachments is very dangerous since viruses are often sent that way.  We do not send out email asking users to run attached files and we do not sign emails with “math.utoronto.ca Technical Support”.  The spammers are getting craftier with their messages, so we all must be careful.

Also be wary of “phishing attacks”.  The University has information at http://www.news.utoronto.ca/campus-news/u-of-t-computer-staff-warn-of-phishing-scams.html about these.  Remember that no UofT person should ever ask anyone to send username/password combinations via email.