Too much reading on the Internet causes many people a lot of headaches. Seriously, you can get a pain in the head (yeah, it can be a pain there, too, but there isn't much that can be done about that). For the first pain, though, there is some relief. It comes in the form of controlling the Webrowser's text fonts. Netscape Navigator's View menu, for example, has several options for controlling these fonts. You can increase or decrease their size and you can also control the type and colors to make reading easier on your eyes.

To adjust the size, go to the View menu and select Increase or Decrease Font. To adjust the shape and color of Navigator's fonts, click on the Edit menu and drop down to Preferences. In Preferences, select Appearance and expand it by clicking on the plus sign to the left of the word Appearance. The box that will appear will display two additional categories: one for Fonts and one for Colors. Click on Fonts and the browser will display a set of options to adjust the aspects of the Navigator's text fonts. With the Variable Width Font dropdown box, you can adjust the type, or shape, of the text font you want to use in your browser. You can also tell Navigator to ignore special fonts, such as Dynamic Fonts, and default to the fonts you choose.

To adjust the text font colors, go back to the Appearance list and select colors in the Appearances category. In the resulting panel, you can configure text and background colors to make reading easier for you.

Cookies are bits of information that Web sites use to store data about a user so they can retrieve and use it later. With a cookie, Web sites can store information about your computer or browser, and they can keep some information about you, like a user id or preferences for sites like Yahoo. Sometimes the sites will use the data in your current session or during a later one. Cookies may save time and help Web pages process and display information more quickly and easily.

Since some of us find them irritating and an intrusion on our privacy, Navigator provides options that let you control cookies to a certain extent. To get to the cookie options, go to Edit and select Preferences. Once in Preferences, click on Advanced in the list box. Cookies appear on the bottom of display a panel for the Advanced section. The three radio buttons can be used to accept or disable all cookies. There is another option in which you can choose to accept cookies that only get sent back to the originator, which are those cookies that help you display the Web page you are visiting or help you login to a site that you have been to before.

In the section on cookies, you can check a box that says: "Warn me before accepting a cookie." This is an option that creates a pop-up box every time anyone attempts to "set" a cookie. This can be very, very irritating to see all the time. It will however, give you an idea on just how many cookies are used by various sites.

When hunting for information, you may find bits and pieces you need among long pages filled with huge amounts of data. To capture this data you can highlight the area of interest, copy it, minimize your Navigator window, open the word processor of your choice and then paste in your copied information. You can then restore your Navigator window. As you find more information, you can repeat this cut-and-paste process. By saving all that you find in the word processor screen, you can create a document that contains only the information you need. After your document is finished, you can print just the data that interests you. You can also paste the URL addresses of the document you are using just in case you want to go back to the source. [For more information on cutting and pasting from the Web, see Ken's Korner.-Ed.]

What you don't know (or find) can hurt you. After a while, most of us who search on the Internet look to just a handful of search engines. This can leave a lot of information resources untapped. You live with search results that don't give you everything the Internet has to offer. Most of the major search engines do a reasonably good job of turning up information on almost anything, but none can cover everything available on the Internet. Studies have shown that even the major search engines are capable of indexing only 10 to 30 percent of the Web. If you're serious about your research, that's just not good enough. If you think you're missing information in your searches, diversify your search resources. Look for the META search engines and Web directories that were created to cover the subject matter you're searching for. Check out newsgroups, mailing lists, FTP sites, Telnet sites, and specialized databases that aren't available by strictly using the common Web sites and pages.