f digits to present, the Factbook staff
assesses the accuracy of the original data and the needs of US
Government officials. All of the economic data are processed by
computer--either at the source or by the Factbook staff. The economic
data presented in The Factbook, therefore, follow the rounding
convention used by virtually all numerical software applications,
namely, any digit followed by a "5" is rounded up to the next higher
digit, no matter whether the original digit is even or odd. Thus, for
example, when rounded to the nearest integer, 2.5 becomes 3, rather
than 2, as occurred in some pre-computer rounding systems.

Technical

Does The World Factbook comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation
Act regarding accessibility of Web pages?

The World Factbook home page has a link entitled "Text/Low Bandwidth
Version." The country data in the text version is fully accessible. We
believe The World Factbook is compliant with the Section 508 law in
both fact and spirit. If you are experiencing difficulty, please use
our comment form to provide us details of the specific problem you are
experiencing and the assistive software and/or hardware that you are
using so that we can work with our technical support staff to find and
implement a solution. We welcome visitors' suggestions to improve
accessibility of The World Factbook and the CIA Web site.

I am using the Factbook online and it is not working. What is wrong?

Hundreds of "Factbook" look-alikes exist on the Internet. The Factbook
site at: www.cia.gov is the only official site.

When I attempt to download a PDF (Portable Document Format) map file
(or some other map) the file has no image. Can you fix this?

Some of the files on The World Factbook Web site are large and could
take several minutes to download on a dial-up connection. The screen
might be blank during the download process.

When I open a map on The World Factbook site, it is fuzzy or granular,
or too big or too small. Why?

Adjusting the resolution setting on your monitor should correct this
problem.

Is The World Factbook country data available in machine-readable
format? All I can find is HTML, but I'm looking for simple tabular
data.

The Factbook Web site now features "Rank Order" pages for selected
Factbook entries. "Rank Order" pages are available for those data
fields identified with a small bar chart icon located next to the title
of the data entry. In addition, all of t