Re: CarDisk on the Mac

[Thomas Washburn <thomasw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> > When we bought ours over a year ago they were only available
> > for Windows. I tried it at work and the supplied program 
> > (written in VB) is truly horrible. At the time I offered to
> > write a cross platform program for CarDisk but they never 
> > even replied. All I was asking was for a few technical details
> > (ie no payment).
> > 
> > So I copied the PC CD onto another CD after having arranged 
> > all the files by type (ie owners manuals, TSBs, etc)  into 
> > folders (couldn't believe they had everything in one directory...
> > crazy) and after having translated them all into PICT files
> > (should have made them GIF). We just use Graphic Converter to
> > read them now.
>
> Yeah, that's probably the most elegant way to do it... but
> SoftWindows costs less than $150, and while it's even slower
> than "real" Windows,it should be OK for running CarDisk, and
> considerably less extravagant of time and equipment than Jeff's
> way. 
> 
> Maybe some smart Mac pro out there should look into doing
> something like CarDisk for the Mac, and doing it more 
> efficiently as Jeff has suggested. 

(For those just tuning in: the CarDiscs contain a bunch of raster-
file scans of Alfa's original, printed manual pages.  These images
are organized and accessed through a custom front-end.  The front-
end program is super flakey.  What's worse, it's available only 
for 16-bit compatible flavors of Microsoft Windows.)

The right answer is to store all the scans as GIFs or JPEGs, 
indexed by a hierarchy of HTML files.  That way, any computer with
a web browser could read the CarDisc.  It would also leave all of
the front-end development work to the programmers at Microsoft and
Netscape, who are continually improving their free browsers.  

I suppose one could write and distribute a script to convert each
CarDisc.  Obviously, one couldn't legally distribute the converted
data itself, since that would violate somebody's copyright.

- - Tom
thomasw@domain.elided

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