About Meva Meva Form Help Field Help Result Help Glossary History MePrep DeutschThe following are frequently asked questions and answers related to Meva.
This odd behaviour can occur with different browsers and versions whilst saving the file:
Internet Explorer: If you get an alert message warning that the page may not be saved properly, simply ignore that. You may also select the "Do not display this message again" checkbox to prevent the message from appearing in the future.
Now Explorer will show you the Save As dialog box. Make sure Explorer suggests "Web Page, HTML only" as file type. Enter a name for the file to save and select OK.
Note: If Explorer suggests "Text File", do not try to change the proposed file type, otherwise you browser may hang! Instead cancel this window and select the Save As command once more. Now Explorer should suggest "Web Page, HTML only" as file type. This odd behaviour should only happen the first time you want to save a form result in an Explorer session and is a bug in earlier Explorer Versions.
Netscape/Mozilla: If you get an error message: "The link could not be saved. The web page might have been removed or had its name changed." you may copy the source code of the Meva result into a text file and rename the file extension to .HTML then. Follow this guideline to get the file saved:
This is a bug in newer versions of Netscape and Mozilla.
Opera: When you submit the form to Meva with the form option Text, Opera may ask if it shall open or save the file. Some Opera Versions assume per default text data (generated by a CGI) to be of MIME type application/octet-stream. This is of little sense. To suppress that, select in the File menu below
File|Preferences|File types
the option
Determine action by MIME type.
You have exceeded the maximal input size Meva admits. To protect the network, Meva does not allow huge input file sizes. Possible workarounds:
Avoid to save your Meva result with more than one dot in the file name. A file name like result.txt would be fine.
This can happen to articles indexed by the NLM with terms created after the yearly publication of the MeSH tree. Another reason might be sending an older PubMed result file (with possibly outdated terms) to Meva. You can determine these outliers in the details table by checking MeSH-Codes in Meva's form; the outliers will appear without a code.
When you print out Mevas result page you may notice that some items on the page disappear like histogram bars or table backgrounds. Mevas result page contains background colours, and these are the items that are disappearing. Background printing is the setting on your Internet browser software that decides whether to print these background items or not.
Choosing not to print background images and colours saves on ink, and is a preferred option for many considering the cost of cartridges. However, to get the histograms on paper you have to print Mevas result page with all background items.
Please check the option for background printing in your web browser. You can find it in Opera below File|Print options, in Internet Explorer for Windows below Extras|Internet Options|Advanced|Printing|Print background colors and pictures, in Internet Explorer for Macintosh (OS9.2 and X) below File|Print|Copies & pages (OS9.2) or General (X)|Internet Explorer|Print background and in Netscape below File|Page Setup. Netscape 4 however still has enormous problems with that, so an upgrade to a newer version or the use of Opera resp. Internet Explorer would be a better solution. For instructions relating to other browser software not covered here please consult documentation supplied with your computer.
Increase the print density of your printer (say 600 dpi or more) or change the printing mode of your printer from raster to halftone processing.
Before printing, you should always use the Print Preview Command of your browser before printing pages to get an idea of print layout and font sizes. Afterwards, you can use the Page Setup Command of your browser to change the size of all the margins of the printed page. Apart from that, you can reduce the font size of the printout (Netscape: File|Print Preview|Scale: Shrink to Fit; Internet Explorer: View|Font Size; Opera: File|Print Options|Scale print to). If both still results in printing cut-off, change the printing orientation from Portrait to Landscape. Also you can decrease the top count in Meva's form.
Do you have poor eyesight? Do you have a fuzzy monitor? This Web site is designed to support you! Every page on this Web site supports text scaling.
Internet Explorer Users: Select View in the Browser Menu. Then select Font Size. Then select Larger or Largest.
Opera: Simply press the Plus button once or multiple times.
Netscape: Select View in the Browser Menu. Then select Increase Font.
Netscape Version 6 and above: Select View in the Browser Menu. Then select Font Size.
Netscape 4 has enormous problems to process CSS format assignments in a proper way and many bugs as well. Again, upgrade to a more recent Netscape version (V.6 should be fine) or use Opera resp. Internet Explorer.
This seems to be a bug in Mozilla 7. Try to use recent Opera or Internet Explorer versions for printing purposes.
That's ok. The fields of the returned data are separated by tabs, which looks weird inside a browser. But don't worry, each database will correctly import that data. If you only to intend to view these data, load that file into a text processor which allows to set personal tab stop positions.
This relates only to Meva versions prior to V. 2.4. Possible reasons
For 2. you can't help much except trying to switch the Proxy off in your browser settings (provided it's not a transparent proxy of your ISP). For 3. we would appreciate a feedback. Now let's talk about 1, the most common reason:
Web server and Meva determine the language by the language option set inside your browser. Sometimes this setting is wrong. Most browsers allow you to change this value inside a list. You should set the preferred language to all the languages you speak, ordered by your preference.
So an English speaking person should have at least an 'en' within this list. Do not add country extensions to a language as in 'en-US' unless you have good reason! The reason is if your browsers requests a file in 'en-US' f.i. and the server has this file only in 'en' he will not return this English file to you but instead give an 413 error. This sounds illogical, I know, but that is the procedure as defined in the corresponding RFC. Some webbrowsers set mistakenly a country extension by default depending from your operating systems language settings - better remove that extension in that case. For not English speaking persons, it is a good idea to add English ('en') as last in the list otherwise webservers with no fallback language will give you a 413 Not acceptable error in case the webserver has no file in your language.
Note: with Netscape 4.x you need to make sure you select the language from the available choices. A number of people reported problems because they typed in the language by hand.
Note: Meva supports only English and German at the moment. For any other browser language, Meva will return English by default.
You can answer to that question safely with Yes. The script IE is referring to is only for more user's convenience. It checks if you have filled in the compulsory form fields (f.i. the file name) or gives some consultational hints. The form also works fine without the script, so can you enter even No and Meva would work anyway.
If you like, you can tell Internet Explorer to suppress further questions with the setting below:
Extras|Internet Options|Security
Either you tried to send a huge file to Meva, you have a slow net connection or the server is overburdened. In the 1st case there's help: You can compress the file with MePrep before sending it to Meva. This will accelerate your consultation.
Especially if you combine fields which occur usually multiple time inside an article like MeSH Terms or Authors, the number of returned details table cells will explode in a combinational way. There are several workarounds you can use; start with the first one and if this is not sufficient, try the next: