The small pictures in the text of articles are called "thumbnails." They are supposed to be small enough to load quickly and large enough to get the general idea of what it is. (See the related question below.)

Red Book® Online supports a two-step expansion of thumbnail images. Clicking on a thumbnail displays a larger version of a figure as well as the complete text of the figure's caption. You don't need any additional software to view this medium-size image. See Viewing Figures for more details.

This reflects a problem in the setup of your image viewer. Please see Help with High-Resolution Image Viewing.

We considered reducing image sizes, but we found that we were unable to maintain sufficient quality in smaller images.

See the instructions in Red Book® Online Features.

We display a figure directly after the paragraph in which it is first mentioned. If an author chooses to label a figure "Figure 3" but refers to it in the text before Figures 1 or 2, the figures will appear out of order.

The tiny images are the only way for us currently to represent symbols that are not available in the standard HTML ISO-Latin-1 character set.

However, HTML standards are being developed which will allow us to represent at least some of these symbols without the use of "inline images". As reliable browsers which support those standards become available, we'll use fewer inline images for symbols and special characters.

This could have two causes: either you have Auto Load Images turned off, or you have encountered an image which didn't get processed.

If you have enabled Auto Load Images and the image still doesn't display, please send us Feedback and we'll investigate the problem.

If you are having trouble, please take a look at our Help with Searching page.