CarDisk continued

[Will Owen <nashwill@xxxxxxxxx>]

In V.7, #429, Thomas Washburn quoted me and commented:

> 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...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."

Lifting data from the CarDisks, reorganizing it and then distributing
it would certainly be piracy, and I hope nobody thought I was
encouraging that. A conversion script such as Tom suggests would be
one way to handle it. Another way, more like what I had in mind, would
be to redo the project from scratch (scan the manuals, etc.), only
with a decent interface. The ideal medium, which did not exist when
the CarDisks were done, is the PDF format, made using Adobe Acrobat.
This builds documents that are small, that can be made interactive,
and which can be read on and printed from ANY computer (Mac, Windows
95 or later, or Windows NT) that has the free Acrobat Reader installed. 

Will Owen
Nashville, TN


_________________________________________________________
DO YOU YAHOO!?
Get your free @domain.elided address at http://mail.yahoo.com

------------------------------